


Alien Visitation

by A_Damned_Scientist



Category: Farscape
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe, Canon Het Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 09:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 35,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/924642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Damned_Scientist/pseuds/A_Damned_Scientist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Aeryn travel to Earth in the hope that they will find a sanctuary, untouched by the conflicts in the Uncharted Territories. But things don’t go according to plan. There is trouble waiting for them and more trouble is hot on their heels, whilst ghosts from their past - and from their possible future - force them to confront old choices and make difficult, new ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Artwork for this fic: [Alien Visitation, by Whogate](http://archiveofourown.org/works/943441)  
> Alien Visitation by Whogate.
> 
> PG for language, threat/peril, non-graphic violence and a (very) few swear words. Oh, and a not very graphically described birth scene. Also be warned of main character death. But this is Farscape, so hopefully that's just something one has to deal with from time to time.
> 
> Spoilerific Background: Those not familiar with the show might need a little extra help to follow this fanfic. Let's start with the précis of the 'story so far' from the final miniseries: 
> 
> "Once upon a time there was a boy named John and John was an astronaut. He lived in a far-away place called Earth which is so far away you've never heard of it. One day when John was out doing astronaut things a big, blue wormhole gobbled him up and spat him out at the far end of the universe. Things were looking grim in Mudville, till our hero met an amazing living ship, made some nice new friends, and he hooked up with his dream girl. We could've lived happily ever after, but the Peacekeepers raped, chased and tortured us for years on end. And two months ago, we got our asses shot off again. This time it was the Scarrans, big reptiles...." 
> 
> OK, so far so good, but if you haven’t watched the show you may still want a few more details pertinent to my story: In season 3 John was duplicated by the 'criminally insane' scientist Karvok (as was their shipmate, Chiana, although her twin was immediately murdered by Karvok). One copy of John went off with Aeryn on a ship called Talyn, the other remained with Chiana on their original ship, called Moya. Later, on a planet called Dam Ba Da, Talyn's crew discovered that an avaricious mechanic named Furlow, who they had met in Season 1, had replicated John's module and was using it to research wormholes. Whilst on Dam Ba Da Aeryn agreed to go to Earth with TalynJohn, but, before they could go, he was killed by radiation poisoning while trying to stop Scarrans, a belligerent race of lizards, getting hold of Furlow's and John's wormhole research. A grieving Aeryn then returned to Moya. Soon after that they assisted Talyn and another ex-Peacekeeper named Crais to destroy the Peacekeeper Command Carrier where Crais and Aeryn had been stationed at the start of season 1. This Command Carrier was now the base of the Peacekeeper scientist Scorpius's wormhole research. However, Aeryn could not cope with seeing a duplicate of her dead lover alive, and left Moya at the end of season 3. Aeryn returned in season 4, seriously ill and having promised a now disgraced Scorpius sanctuary from the Peacekeepers aboard Moya. She was unwilling to say where she had been and what she had done during her 'summer holiday.' She was keen to renew her relationship with John, but, for various reasons, he refused. During Season 4 Moya travelled to Earth, John and Aeryn reconciled, Aeryn was captured by the Scarrans (see the intro paragraph above) and then rescued. Finally, during the post-cancellation miniseries, the couple married and Aeryn gave birth to their son, D'Argo, named after their now dead Luxan friend and shipmate of that name. 
> 
> Thanks: To Vinegardog for the beta read and suggestions. Thanks to Whogate for the graphic on AO3/LJ HetBigBang. Thanks to mpaige (Michael Paige) on TerraFirma for a manip of the poster for Star Trek: Into Darkness which started one of these story threads off. http://terrafirmascapers.com/index.php/topic,41706.msg944339.html#msg944339
> 
> This story actually started out as two different outlines I was working on – One story was to fill some prompts from Schmacky, the other was inspired by the mpaige manip mentioned above – but I just couldn’t seem to complete either outline. When I mentioned to some Scapers that I’d written 88 FS fanfics and was running out of inspiration one of them suggested I should do a big fic next, to match the 88 eps and miniseries of the show. With some trepidation, I tried blending the two fics I was working on and found it worked, although sadly I then never did get far with filling Schmacky’s prompts.
> 
> Disclaimer: The characters are not mine. No money is being made, not in this reality anyway.

**Prologue**

 

"Then what does it do? Blow up? You buildin' a bomb here Jack?" Furlow asked as another explosion outside sent dust spiralling down from the high ceiling of her workshop. The Charrid mercenaries had been counter-attacking all day, ever since being driven from the building by Aeryn Sun, John Crichton and their allies, Rygel, Crais and the enigmatic alien known as Jack.

"Not at all." Jack fixed her with an inscrutable stare. "After 1.4 arns, a meltdown occurs and destroys the device."

"So - you only get one shot at - whatever it is this thing does." It was more a statement than a question. Whatever Furlow might or might not be, she wasn't stupid. She knew the implications of what Jack was saying, knew what it meant for her own hopes of survival once the Scarrans got here, to say nothing of turning a tidy profit.

"That's all I should need. I'm launching soon."

"You're flyin' the module?" The primitive little craft that had brought the human, John Crichton, to their galaxy seemed to be the secret to controlling wormholes. Furlow had realized that when she'd first met Crichton two cycles earlier. That was why she'd spent so much time and money to build her own replica of his module. And it was that replica that Jack was now talking about taking and using, against her own interests.

"Yes." Again, Jack's delivery was cold, lifeless. Not surprising, really, as an old Sebacean male wasn't the alien's true physical form. It must have been hard to express nuance when you weren’t even used to your body.

"Does Johnny know about this?" Furlow was fairly certain she could manipulate John. Well, maybe just a little bit. At least she knew some of his 'levers': his infatuation with that skinny Peacekeeper bitch, Aeryn Sun, for one. Yep, if she could get Jack out of the way, at least she'd stand a chance with John.

"No - and I don't want to have an argument with him about it. As soon as he and Aeryn give the all-clear from outside, I want you to open those hangar doors. Now go on." Jack flashed her a slight smile and started back towards the displacement engine. It was now or never, Furlow decided, standing her ground. Jack frowned and looked back towards her. "Well go on! I'm about to start the reactor."

Furlow shook her head. "I can't let you do that Jack." Time to lay the cards on the table, she thought, openly letting him see the gun she had just drawn on him. "Back off." Would it be win or lose, profit or loss?

"This is the only chance we have to keep the Scarrans from..."

"From payin' me - a lot of money. Now - you ain't goin' - nowhere."

Jack looked at her for a moment, his brow furrowing and his lips starting to curl into something, maybe a smile, maybe a sneer, maybe something else. Then he turned and continued towards the displacement engine. Furlow fired and his body crumpled to the floor without another sound. It was all so easy. She carelessly blew the tip of her gun and gave a loud whistle.

A pair of Charrid mercenaries immediately dropped down on cables from where they had been hiding, high up in the rafters of her workshop. The leader whipped off his helmet, making him considerably less pleasing to the eye, whilst the other stood guard, rifle at the ready.

"You had to kill him! He would have made a useful prize!" The Charrid leader snarled furiously at Furlow.

"You think he'd'a cooperated?" She dismissed Jack with a wave. "Forget it. This..." she indicated the displacement engine with another wave. "...my friend, is the prize!"

"What is it?" The Charrid leader demanded. It was impossible to say if he furrowed his brow, what with how ugly he was.

Furlow clicked her tongue in speculation. "Well - it's a - um - I don't exactly know what it is. But I do know that our friend here seemed to think that it could kill a Scarran Dreadnought."

'~'

"JOHN!" Aeryn shouted, flagging down his crude vehicle, which comprised little more than four wheels and an engine mounted in a home-made metal roll cage fitted with a pair of fur-covered seats.  He skidded to a halt and she climbed aboard. He felt like an extra in a Mad Max movie. Only an extra, though: Aeryn had way more of the Max about her than he did.

"Furlow's with the Scarrans!" John brought her and the dune buggy up to speed. They had to shout at each other to be heard over the sounds of the vehicle and its engine as they rattled over the rough terrain of Dam Ba Da.

"That would explain why the Charrids have stayed on the perimeter." She replied. He could always rely on his girl to see the military angle. His girl. He'd barely gotten used to the idea. He liked the sound of it.

"Explains a lot of things!"

"You know we are running out of time!"

"We still got time." He said with a self confident grin.

"You know this new knowledge you've got in your head?" She shouted over the din.

"Yeah?"

"Can you use it to get home?"

"Yah." John answered, almost too quietly to be heard over the racket of their vehicle. It was a delicate subject, one which he was nervous about discussing with her. She had never been shy in expressing her reservations about going to Earth and was undoubtedly scared he might go without her. Their experiences two years earlier, when he had been tricked into leaving to go to a simulation of Earth without her, and her imprisonment when she had followed him, had only reinforced those fears.

"Let's do what we have to do here and then we'll go," she shouted. John was so surprised and thrilled by her words that he took his eyes off the track to look at her for a second. He'd waited two years to hear Aeryn say something like that. All of his dreams since he had arrived in this distant part of the Universe crystallised in that moment: he would no longer have to choose between going home, to Earth, or staying with Aeryn. He could have it all.

A near miss from a pulse weapon snapped him back into the reality of the present and he returned his attention to the pursuit of Furlow.

"Home to Earth, huh? Together? Take you home to meet the folks?" She nodded and he smiled to himself. "It's about time."

It was always about time.


	2. Chapter 2

"Good evening. I am your host, R Wilson Munroe and tonight on Alien Visitation we will be asking – and answering – some of the most intriguing questions yet raised by the words and deeds of the crew of Moya during their stay on Earth. Questions such as: what caused the terrible destruction at Jack Crichton’s house on Christmas eve; who murdered IASA scientists Douglas and Laura Knox and Secret Service Agent Jim Cook; and what was the dark secret at the heart of the crew of Moya that our government did not want us to hear? And, of course, what was the true nature of the relationship between Commander John Crichton and the Sebacean Peacekeeper Officer Aeryn Sun? Were they, as many have suggested, lovers?"

John looked up from the TV as Aeryn walked into their family quarters aboard Moya, their precocious ten month old son, D'Argo, toddling beside her, while her new, but rapidly growing, baby-bump preceded her by a couple of denches. John registered their arrival and swiftly flicked off the TV. John was ever ready with the remote these days lest D'Argo see or hear something unsuitable for his young eyes and ears. Aeryn, on the other hand, did not seem to regard anything as unsuitable for their son. It was just one of those little cultural differences they had to work through. He'd been brought up in a loving family, she'd been brought up in a brutal military crèche. At least she no longer argued with him about child rearing. Indeed, she seemed to have conceded that, as he knew considerably more about bringing up infants as anything other than child-soldiers than she did, then they should follow what seemed right and normal to him in such matters. 

The TV was one of the many presents from home which Aeryn had acquired for John during their brief, disastrous visit to Earth the previous year, one of the key things which made his life in this distant part of the Universe, surrounded by alien people and alien artefacts, just a little less difficult to cope with. Aeryn had long since told him about Yondaloo's revelation, that Sebaceans were genetically modified humans, taken from Earth tens of thousands of years ago to serve as soldiers for the Eidelons. But regardless of that John found that the cultural differences between them could still be quite alienating.

He noticed that she arched a questioning eyebrow at his decision to turn off the TV. He tried to ignore her unspoken enquiry. The last thing he wanted was to risk D'Argo seeing something unsuitable. Well, that was the last thing he wanted after seeing a pregnant Aeryn fly into a hormone-fuelled rage at the sight of Munroe's lurid speculations about John's relationship with his almost-but-not-quite-human wife.

"Was that a new transmission?" Aeryn asked, lowering herself carefully onto the couch alongside John, her eyes never leaving D'Argo as he toddled over to his favourite toy Prowler in the far corner of the room. The couch was local, rather than Earth-sourced, but its provenance was far from obvious: Once John and Aeryn had started living together she had happily indulged his desire to seek out a few 'home comforts' with which to furnish their shared quarters. It had even been her who had discovered the all-American-looking couch on a planet-side resupply trip a few monens earlier, barely batting an eyelid when John had teased her about it, saying she only liked it because it was finished in black leather.

"Yup." John responded to her question, never taking his eyes off of the now-blank TV screen or his hand off of the remote. "Pilot picked it up earlier. Along with another Twilight movie and an Alien prequel... "

"And?"

"Truly awful. I don’t know why they bothered." He tossed the remote control out of Aeryn's reach. She rolled her eyes at him and sighed.

"I was talking about the documentary," she explained evenly, displaying some of her relatively new-found reserves of patience. She hefted herself up enough to retrieve the remote from the stack of books and videotapes in front of the TV. John intercepted D'Argo and the toy Prowler in mid flight, pulling them onto his lap for protection - a human-Sebacean shield should his ex-soldier, ex-assassin wife change her mind and feel that his flippancy merited punishment. Not that he didn't secretly like it, just a little, when she did.

"What did they say this time?" she asked, jabbing the remote at the screen and restarting the show. He'd lost this one and he knew it. He'd just have to hang onto the hope that she didn’t see anything which might cause her to fly off the handle.

As if to answer her question, the arrogant, humourless face of Dr Edith Anderson filled the screen. John winced in anticipation of what his wife and son might be about to hear. Throughout Munroe's Alien Visitation broadcasts Dr Anderson had maintained an unequalled track record in providing offensive, derogatory and inflammatory sound bites. She didn’t disappoint this time.

"If John Crichton has truly...  mated... and aligned himself with an alien from such an aggressive, intolerant and militaristic species, how could any human in their right mind ever really trust him again?" The camera cut to a head-and-shoulders view of Munroe, who smiled knowingly at the camera, giving an almost imperceptible nod of agreement.

"Nothing the sprout needs to hear." John growled, angry at what was being said on the TV rather than at Aeryn or his child. He snatched the remote back from her and pressed pause. She glared at him menacingly, what John had long since regarded as Peacekeeper Look Number One, or 'don't frell with me Erpman, I could pin you to the deck in a microt.'

"We can watch it this evening if you really want." He nodded his chin at D'Argo to indicate their infant son as the excuse for his reticence. She blinked at him, her face remaining blank of emotions. Poker games in the Peacekeeper Officers' mess must have been extraordinary affairs. He shifted uneasily under her stare, his leather trousers squeaking as they rubbed against the leather couch. Even his trousers sounded nervous. "There's plenty more bits like that. It's educational."

She continued staring at him inscrutably for a painful handful of microts before nodding in acquiescence. John allowed the now wriggling D'Argo to slip out of his arms and renew his play. At least they could both be grateful that their son had seemed to pay no attention to the odious views expressed in the documentary nor had he made the connection that the people on the TV might have been talking about his parents.

"Perhaps you should put a different recording in?" Aeryn ventured. He recognised that she was probably trying in her own, stumbling, emotionally underdeveloped way to reach out and make peace between them.

"I hear there's a great new romcom over on the SciFi channel?" John tried to lighten the mood. "Three cookie gals and three hunky guys move into adjacent apartments? Makes a change from wrestling shows, anyway...."

"What the frell are you talking about, John?" Aeryn paused just long enough for John's crest to fall. Why did he persist in trying to crack jokes about Earth culture, he wondered? He must just be a slow learner. "We can't get the SciFi channel out here..." she nudged him with her elbow, grinned and arched an eyebrow at him.

"Oh, ha ha..." John replied, but his smile belied his words. Secretly he was chuffed that Aeryn had grown so much from the repressed and dour Peacekeeper that she had once been and relieved that she was still in a good mood, despite the views that she had just witnessed being expressed on the TV. The realisation that she must also have watched the SciFi channel on Earth, without him, soon chased his smile away.

"Do you want to visit?" she asked. Her voice was gentle, encouraging, in no way negative about the idea. Perhaps it was a trick of the translator microbes? They still threw him the odd curve-ball from time to time. "Earth?" She rubbed his hand and smiled softly at him, cocking her head as she waited for an answer. Seemed like she was serious: His very own sweet little domestic assassin. Perhaps she could get a slot on daytime TV? It would have to be something like giving advice on exterminating household vermin, though - baking and sewing and stuff like that were hardly her things. For the briefest instant he wondered what she’d look like in a twinset and pearls.

"You've just seen that dren and you still want to visit?" The question only half surprised him. He knew that she had made friends on Earth - his younger sister, particularly - and that she knew how much Earth, family and friends meant to him. But still, she had hardly been made to feel welcome by everyone there, either at the time of their visit last year or, so it could be seen from the documentaries, since they had left. The authorities had been a mix of suspicious, manipulative and demanding.  Many others they had encountered or heard the views of were merely hostile.

"John, remember, I've been on Earth. I know what your TV can be like. And I also know I have friends there, people who liked me. Like your sister."

"You know we can't.... I closed the wormhole." He had finally closed the wormhole to Earth the previous year, to protect the planet from a Scarran attack and had told anyone who asked that there was now no way to get there that didn’t involve decades of conventional interstellar travel.

"From every point of entry, a wormhole branches into multiple paths," Aeryn recited as though it was something she had heard many times before. "Destination - is the key."

"You've been paying attention?" John teased. He hoped she was the only one who had, because she was dangerously close to uncovering an uncomfortable truth. She frowned at him, causing him a moment of worry that he had overstepped the mark, before she dispelled his worries by punching him gently on the arm.

"So wormholes can connect all places and times, right?" Aeryn persisted. Frell. She really did seem to be worrying her way towards the truth.

"Well, sort of...." John conceded. "Every destination is surrounded by similar unrealized realities..."

"So can you or can you not find your way back to Earth?" Aeryn demanded. Damn his jirl: she could always be relied on to boil things right down to the black and white (and red) and then go in for the kill.

"Mm... yeah," John conceded quietly. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go home. Or rather, to Earth and his dad and sisters and pizza and beer and football and movies, he corrected himself. Home was Moya now, Moya and Aeryn and their family. It was more that he was scared to. Scared of what deadly critters might follow him, scared of having the deaths of more people that he loved on his conscience. Scared of what people might say or do now there was no way to dodge the relationship between him and Aeryn, no hiding from the fact that they had one half-breed kid running around and another well on the way. John Crichton had grown up in Tennessee. He'd seen how his fellow homo sapiens could react to stuff as mundane as mixed-ethnicity human couplings, even partners from the wrong side of the tracks or with the wrong surname. Frell, wait till they get a load of us, he thought with a mix of sadness and worry.

"Then we should go." Aeryn stated flatly, breaking his train of thought. "I know you're scared, John, but there's nothing we can't overcome together." She touched his cheek with her fingertips and smiled one of her full-wattage smiles. All of John Crichton's objections melted.

She leant in to kiss him. He suspected she had intended a kiss on the cheek or forehead, but within a couple of microts their lips were locked. Good job they already had a room. And a pair of baby sitters, in Chiana and Noranti, permanently on call.

Not that she seemed interested in taking him to bed. His lips occupied, he waved a hand frantically as she began to push him down onto the sofa, trying to alert her to the need to summon one of those babysitters for their son before things got too out of hand.  His reluctance to make out in front of their kid was just another of those little cultural differences, he supposed.


	3. Chapter 3

The Virginia countryside sure did look lush this spring, John thought to himself as he made one last pass over the airfield in the module in order to visually confirm the presence of various TV news crews amongst the assembled throng. The reporters were identifiable by their familiarly branded vans and through the presence of the film crews: Equipment laden trios and quartets of people, dressed in civilian clothing. He banked the module to bring them back towards the agreed landing site, giving a final thumbs-up to Aeryn, lining up to bring them in to land on a gentle trajectory.

After his bad experience on the Ancients' false earth, there was no way he wasn't taking precautions this time, no way he was going to risk Aeryn and himself being quietly and secretly whisked away, hidden from the eyes of the world in some high-security military base. He had demanded the presence of the journalists at the landing site as part of his conditions before coming down from orbit.

The module rolled to a halt, only about two hundred yards from the welcoming committee. He gave one last cursory check, making sure that the eyes of the media were on them, for their own protection against the machinations of his own government. Satisfied, he popped the module's canopy open.

He stood, looking around him, squinting in the sun and shielding his eyes with one hand. He nodded in satisfaction and began to climb down the short distance to the ground. He couldn’t quite believe it. After two and a half years of unbelievable adventures, he had finally made it home to Earth, safe and sound.

He heard Aeryn begin to clamber out of the cockpit behind him. She had made it quite clear, earlier, that she did not entirely share John's confidence in his precautions, but she had finally agreed to accept his assurances because it was his world, his rules. John looked over his shoulder in time to see her reach out a hand, leaning on the bulky displacement engine to steady herself against the heat. The contraption was useless now, burnt out, but was still secured to the module behind the cockpit. John had been in such a hurry to get home to Earth after Dam Ba Da that he had not gotten around to removing it from the module. He smiled reassuringly up at Aeryn and offered her his right hand to steady herself with as she began to climb down. She returned his smile with a more uncertain one of her own, took the offered hand for a moment, and then leapt down. She landed with easy grace on the concrete beside him. As he turned back towards the crowd, John gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and tried to hang on to it, but she wriggled free of his grip. He glanced her way, wondering what was up, only to see that her hand had come to rest in its accustomed place, hovering over the stock of the pulse pistol holstered on her thigh. She began to strum her fingers lightly on her 'comfort blanket.'

Satisfied that she wasn’t going to shoot anyone, at least not yet, John looked back towards the welcome party. A four star general, no less, flanked by a handful of suits, another handful of military types and two news crews, had been walking forwards while they were getting down and were now almost upon them.

"Commander Crichton?" the general saluted, then smiled and held out his hand.

"That's me," John replied, leaning forwards and grinning as he took the outstretched hand.

"And..." The general paused and frowned as his eyes raked Aeryn, who had positioned herself on John's right hand side, keeping her gun-arm free and unencumbered. John could almost guess what he might be thinking: She looks human. Aliens should look Alien. If only he knew. Did Spielberg ever get it wrong or what? "Officer Aeryn Sun?"

"That's my girl." John beamed proudly. "The Radiant Aeryn Sun. Saved my ass out there more times than I care to count." Aeryn nodded curtly but did not speak, not that she knew many words in English anyway, thought John, and no one here but him could understand Sebacean. Someone motioned that they should walk a few yards to where a podium and some seats had been set up. It looked like they'd planned an impromptu news conference to record the historic moment. It was all working out just fine. All except for the rattlers he was suddenly starting to feel in the pit of his stomach at the thought that his plans never worked.

Suddenly, at a nod from the general, a gun appeared in every human hand. Aeryn, through a mix of life-long training and genetically enhanced reactions, was ahead of most of them and probably would have shot the general first had John not swiftly moved between them and stilled her arm.

"No, babe!" John pleaded, using his own body to block her shot. "It's hopeless." They were in the open and outgunned fifty to one. He could see the thought processes going on in her head. Surrender or go down fighting? And he knew that her every instinct, drilled into her from birth, was to fight. And that would mean that she would surely die. "They've got us. For now. Let's live to fight another day." He pleaded, desperate to keep her alive. She pushed back against him, as though struggling to line up the shot, but it was half-hearted. He knew that if she really wanted to then he couldn’t have stopped her.

John could see her fuming, see the muscles in her jaw flexing as she ground her teeth, but she did not resist or fight back when a nervous pair of soldiers stepped forward to relieve her of her pulse pistol and him of Winona, his own matching, but still-holstered, Peacekeeper weapon.

As John and Aeryn were led away towards a pair of anonymous looking prisoner transfer trucks, all around them the fake news crews began quietly packing their equipment away.

'~'

Aeryn had to concede that her cell was really quite comfortable. In some ways it was more opulent than her quarters when she had been a Peacekeeper officer. The humans, for all their faults, really could be most accommodating in that way. She had a comfortable bed, a table and chair, books, storage for clothes, a small, private washroom and sanitary facility and even a TV, although she was only allowed to view pre-recorded programmes approved by her captors. An odd show called Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which voiced all of her snarkiest thoughts about what she was watching, was her current favourite. The food, too, had been superb - everything Crichton had led her to believe it would be - not that she had much to compare any of it to, of course. She'd lived most of her life in Spartan conditions. The humans could be feeding her dren, by their standards, and she'd be none the wiser. She'd spent most of her life eating bland, utilitarian Peacekeeper rations and then the last couple of cycles being happy for whatever food she and her shipmates could find. In comparison, human food tasted pretty good to her.

She put down her book - some trashy fantasy adventure set in space - another very human thing. It had been hard to keep learning English without John's constant, gentle and ever-patient encouragement - she had not seen him now for monens - but she and her jailors had found ways for her to keep learning. She had spent arns watching Sesame Street in those first few weekens, when she wasn’t undergoing medical tests, before the interrogations had started in earnest. It was funny, really: they had probably only helped her to learn English because they couldn’t understand Sebacean and they wanted to be able to interrogate her. John would probably have had some strange, incomprehensible saying about their motives. She snorted in amusement at the thought.

John. John Crichton. She felt a most un-Peacekeeper like strain at the back of her throat and behind her eyes. Was it sadness? Regret? Anger? How the frell should she know? What did she know about feelings except what John, and more recently a bunch of tacky Earth entertainments, had taught her? She wiped an eye. She missed him terribly, yet she was coldly furious with him for leading her into this mess, for allowing them both to be captured by his people and treated like some sort of laboratory specimen. She wanted him, yet she was angry with him, blamed him for her current situation. It made no sense. Why did emotions have to be so frelling confusing?

The clatter of locks at the door to her cell told her she had company. Her captors never knocked - they didn’t have to. She folded over the corner of the page that she was on and gently put her book down on the small table beside her solitary chair. Hopefully she'd be able to continue it later - she never knew, for sure, whether she would be coming back to the cell which had become her home.

The door opened to reveal the unmemorable-looking, dark-suited, early middle-aged man she had come to know as Hobbes, along with two heavily-built, uniformed male guards, both holding the strange guns which they called Tazers at the ready.

"Officer Sun," Hobbes grunted, stopping two steps inside her room. He looked away from her, scratching just above his eyebrow. He seemed bored. If he couldn’t be bothered to be civil, neither could she. She made a show of picking up a fashion magazine which was lying on her table, turning her head away from him and crossing her blue-jean clad legs as she began to flick disinterestedly through its almost incomprehensible pages.

"Umm, we, umm, need to take you to the interview suite," Interview suite - she almost laughed. What a nice, human way of describing the interrogation room. Didn’t the crazy frellers understand how difficult it was for her to understand what they meant when they so often refused to call a manual earth moving tool a manual earth moving tool? Hobbes was mumbling in that annoying, semi-detached way of his. Aeryn had been allowed to watch a couple of Colombo movies during her incarceration. Hobbes reminded her of the outwardly bumbling detective, and was consequently inclined to regard Hobbes's apparent ineptitude as a sham.

"I see," She sighed, putting down the magazine. It was no great loss, not being able to read it now. If it was just going to be a standard verbal interrogation, or interview or debriefing as she knew the humans preferred to term them, then it was a chance for her to get out of her room, stretch her legs, have a conversation, maybe even learn something about her imprisonment, if they let anything slip. It would all be a relief from the boredom, so long as they didn’t plan on anything unpleasant. She stood and held out her arms, presenting Hobbes with her wrists. She'd been through the routine enough times - she didn’t need them to tell her what to do.

One of the guards moved forwards to shackle her and she eyeballed him threateningly, just because she could. He didn’t flinch, but he did look away. She smiled, enjoying her little victory. Both she and the guard knew that even if she overpowered the humans, as she had done a few times in the early days of her captivity, then there was nowhere for her to go, just another pair of guards and another locked door beyond her cell. All the doors were opened remotely from she knew not where. There was no escape. Been there, done that, as Crichton might have said. Bought the T-shirt and used it to gag an unfortunate guard, having already secured him with his own handcuffs.

The guard who was cuffing her stepped back and Hobbes pulled a blindfold bag over her head. Just routine, they did it every time they took her out of her cell. Just another precaution, mild by Peacekeeper standards.

"OK," mumbled Hobbes as she simultaneously felt a gentle push forwards on her shoulder and a gentle tug on the lead attached to her shackles.

As she shuffled from her cell she started to speculate as to what they might want this time.

'~'

The door to John's cell opened without warning, as it always did. No frelling courtesy, these guards, interrupting a guy's workout like that. He finished his forty-second push-up, just to spite his visitors, and curled round to sit, slightly sweaty and cross-legged on the floor as a prelude to standing.

"Wassup?" he asked. As he pushed up to his feet he grabbed a towel from the end of his bed and pulled it round his neck.

"We need you to answer some questions," demanded a slightly built man in a dark suit. He was a new one on John. The guy could definitely use some manners. But then, couldn’t everyone here?

"OK, I'll just get a shower and..." he started to turn away towards his small bathroom.

"Now!" insisted the suit, his voice rising slightly in pitch, betraying that the man's patience was near the end of a fairly short leash. No one ever made demands like that, at least not in his cell. John stopped and turned his head, looking over his shoulder. He sniffed ostentatiously at his armpit and grimaced.

"You don’t want me like this," John suggested, waving his arm up like a chicken-wing in an attempt to waft some of the smell towards his captors.

"I must insist!" the suit persisted. A snap from his fingers brought the two military guards forwards, their body language threatening.

Well, after months of the same old shit every day, this was at least a new development. John shrugged, turning round to face them. Plus ca change, huh?

"It's your dollar, your nose," John remarked stepping forwards, arms outstretched and held together, ready for the routine cuffing which accompanied all of the trips out of his cell. "No skin off mine." He winked. No one else seemed in the least amused.

"Done," the guard closest to John slapped on the cuffs, tugging at them to demonstrate that they were secure.

"Best cancel my room service order," John remarked as the guard stepped back to allow the second to double-check the cuffs. "Actually, could you have it sent to the terrace? I thought I'd breakfast by the pool today." John continued to joke as a hood was pulled over his head. There was no terrace. There was no pool. Not that he'd seen, anyway. Just a cell, an interrogation room and a couple of labs. One of the guards prodded him in the back with what felt like his Tazer, encouraging John to move towards the door. Something had gotten them riled today. Maybe Aeryn had tried to escape, beaten up some guards? He hoped it was something like that, not least because that would mean she was still alive, that some crazy Mengele-fan hadn’t tried an experiment too far on her. He just hoped that, if they were agitated over something Aeryn had done that they hadn’t hurt her or punished her. She couldn’t help trying to escape, or using whatever force she thought it might take to do so. It was just the way she was - born and raised a Peacekeeper commando.

They arrived at the interrogation room and removed the hood. The day wasn't working out anything like he had expected. It wasn't working out anything like he had previously experienced, either, during his last few months back on Earth. They seemed to have forgotten about supplying the usual light breakfast. An oversight like that told him that something had definitely spooked his captors.

"Sit down. We've got some questions about your time in the Uncharted Territories." The rude newbie demanded. John sighed and sat. They'd been over all of this already, ad nauseum. He wasn't sure what the hell they were expecting him to tell them now that he hadn’t already told them.

"It's your dollar," he shrugged.

After nearly an hour and several pointed complaints from John, his ever more aggravated interrogator had eventually sent for a selection of comestibles into the interview room, along with a TV for him to watch while he ate. As he sat and began to munch on his pastry, he got his first inkling as to what had upset his guards: The only programme in town was the news coverage, such as it was, of the rapid and systematic degradation of Earth's military strength by some unidentified extraterrestrial force.

Well, that was unexpected.

“I take it this isn’t a new Independence Day movie?” John remarked. They ignored his remark, so, as he was hungry, he went back to eating. It wasn’t that he wasn’t disturbed by what he had seen, but he’d been hardened by the last few years and going hungry wouldn’t change a thing.

"Tell us," the new man in black demanded as John tried to munch on his second pastry, "who they are and if there's anything we can do." For all that John was angry about the treatment of him and Aeryn, at that point he would have done anything he could to help. Unfortunately, he could only guess who the attackers might be or how they might be countered. However, that didn’t mean he couldn’t use the opportunity to try and extract a concession or two from his captors.

"I'll tell you what I can. And so will Aeryn. But this persecution of us has to end."

The man in black looked at John with a blank expression for all of five seconds before nodding his assent. John was so shocked he almost dropped his food. None of his similar demands over the last few months had been met with anything more positive than a casual brush off. This must be serious. Perhaps serious enough to cast Jeff Goldblum as himself and Will Smith as Aeryn?

"How about some sort of show of trust?" John demanded, chancing his arm a bit more, trying to see how far he could get. "I want to see Aeryn! I want to know she's alright!"

Again, to his surprise, the man-in-black nodded, gesturing to someone behind the one-way glass.

A few minutes later a handcuffed and shackled female, blindfolded with a heavy hood and dressed in a white t-shirt, blue jeans and flip-flops was walked into the room by two burly MPs and another man-in-black. He could only presume that Aeryn had been granted limited sartorial choices, as he couldn’t imagine her choosing such an outfit of her own volition. Flip flops, of all things!

Once they were all inside, and the door locked, one of the MPs pulled off the hood to reveal that it was indeed Aeryn. Her hair was longer than he remembered, hanging loose across her shoulders in an ebony waterfall. She blinked in the light for a second or two then glared first at the nearest MP and then at everyone else in turn, including John.

John rushed over to her, throwing his arms round her and holding her tight for a few, long deep breaths before releasing her and running his hand down her cheek.

"Aeryn, you're OK....  I've missed you so much..." He was so relieved to see her alive and well that it took him until the second pass of his hand down her cheek to register how stiff and silent she was at their reunion.

"How have you been, Crichton?" she asked in Sebacean. Frell, she must be pissed with him if she was calling him Crichton rather than John. Whether she chose to use his Christian name or surname had always been a pretty good barometer of how she was feeling about him.

"Aeryn, I've been here, in prison too...  I'm so sorry... I never meant...." he began to apologise and explain.

"You look well." Was that an accusation?

"I'm fine. But I've been worried sick about y..."

"You ruined my life," she interrupted. Apart from the whispered delivery there was little sign now of the humour or affection that had been evident in her voice when she had last said those words, months ago aboard Talyn. She stood rigid, as though on attention. Frell, was he in trouble.

A suspicion began to grow in John's mind that their captors might have fed her all sorts of stories over the last few months in order to try to break her, to get her to talk. Some of those stories probably involved him betraying her. He turned angrily on the agents "What did you bastards do or say to her?!"

"We did what we had to do, Commander Crichton," one of them replied evenly. John looked back towards Aeryn, but she was silent, and that poker-faced mask she so often wore was firmly in place, letting no emotions or insights in or out.

"Now you deliver," a second agent added. They were clearly in no mood to allow John and Aeryn time and space to get reacquainted. "Tell us what you know about this:" he flicked a remote, turning on a monitor showing scenes of destruction from around the planet. Whether they were live or recorded was difficult to tell, but as before it didn’t look to John like normal, human weapons were responsible. John and Aeryn moved closer to the monitor and peered at it, John resting his arm around Aeryn's shoulder although she would have been unable to respond to his physical overtures, even if she had been inclined to do so, as her hands were still cuffed behind her back.

"Difficult to tell from all this," John remarked, waving it away casually, although inside he was in turmoil, trying to understand what he was seeing, trying to guess where he and Aeryn stood with each other.

"One enormous explosion looks much the same as another," Aeryn added. She shrugged to emphasize her apparent casual disinterest.

"Do you have any pictures of the people doing the shooting?" John asked with slightly more animation as the possible significance of what he was seeing started to dawn on him. Could the Peacekeepers have followed them all the way to Earth? It was insane!

"One moment," replied the agent, pausing the video feed and scrolling through a series of options, looking for something.

"Anyone with the technology to come to your planet and attack you would probably be able to utterly destroy you from orbit." Aeryn commented while the agent fiddled with the recording.

"Umm." One of the agents regarded her quizzically and maybe a bit nervously. "Go on..." he encouraged.

"Meaning that they probably want something from you. Other than your destruction."

"They sent ships down to a number of botanical gardens, zoos, that sort of thing."

"Biological specimens, then," John ventured. The agent got his video working and they all turned to watch.

"Scarrans," Aeryn stated after a couple of seconds. John looked at her frowning.

"But the one on the Royal Planet...” John protested. “It had a different shaped head."

"They are Scarrans, Crichton." Aeryn repeated with a sigh, grimly adamant. "I know what I am talking about. I am... was a Peacekeeper. I was trained all my life to fight them. They are the Peacekeepers’ most dangerous enemy."


	4. Chapter 4

 

In the end, it wasn’t that hard to find a wormhole that led back to Earth, or at least back to the Earth's solar system. Indeed, the hardest thing had been persuading Moya and Pilot to play along. They had, at first, been adamant that they wanted nothing more to do with the spatial phenomena. It was Aeryn who had eventually persuaded them to overcome their wormhole phobia in one of her long, private tete-a-tetes with Pilot. However, once out of the wormhole, Moya and Pilot soon forgot their earlier reservations as they played amongst the rocks of Saturn's rings.

"If I live to be a hundred I don’t reckon I'll ever understand what goes on between you two sometimes," John teased his wife gently, propping himself up with both arms as he leant against the main control console on Moya's command deck. It was a running joke between them that, should Aeryn and Pilot had been compatible species, John would never have stood a chance with her. A flashing light on the console caught his attention, causing him to nearly miss her playful wink.

"I don’t know why you didn’t try this before," Aeryn remarked in an offhanded manner, munching on a piece of fruit as she perched on the edge of the strategy table. Young D'Argo, meanwhile, sat on the floor and played contentedly with the shiny metal buckles on her long, black leather boots.

John looked up from his console, shrugged and grunted something non-committal. Like Pilot and Moya, he had had his reasons for not wanting to go playing with wormholes again, even if that meant never returning to Earth. And some of those reasons were still a little too raw, too painful and too difficult to explain even to his wife. After all, Aeryn hadn’t been present last year when the Ancient he called Einstein had given him his tutorial in _ways-he-could-frell-up-the-universe-with-wormholes_. Nor had she been there when he had made a deal with the devil to rescue her from the Scarrans, resulting in his complicity in the painful murder of the blended Chiana-Aeryn in an alternate universe. It had been easier just to tell everyone, Aeryn included, that he had closed the wormhole to Earth and that Einstein had taken all the wormhole knowledge from his head. Both were true up to a point, but neither assertion comprised the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

"I remember this place," Aeryn remarked through a mouthful of fruit, her eyes smiling, happy in her ignorance of his darkening train of thought. "I brought your father here in my Prowler. What did he call it...?"

"The Cassini division," John supplied, grateful for the distraction, for an opportunity to discuss something other than wormholes. Aeryn bit her lower lip, smiled at him and nodded, then turned her attention back to the magnificent view out of the portal.

"Uh hmm. That was it." Her happy expression faded a little. He looked at her, questioning her change in mood.

"Penny for your thoughts?"

"I was just remembering. How we were, you and I, when we were last here."

"Well, that's all behind us now." John stated, reluctant to elaborate further. She turned her head towards him and he looked up and caught her eye. She smiled back at him with a hint of what he took to be nervous uncertainty, although it was always hard to tell with Aeryn.

"Jack and Olivia were convinced you'd 'come round,'" she continued. "They told me all you needed was time."

"It's always about time," he mumbled, looking down to check something on his own console, anything to change the subject. He really did not want to get into a discussion right now about that difficult period in their relationship.

She looked away, gazing out of the portal once again, giving him no indication if she was happy or sad, or even if she had heard his trite response.

John was half-tempted to go over to her, to take her in his arms and talk about their last visit to Earth, to try to unburden some of the guilt he still felt about what had happened, how he had behaved towards her, how he had pushed her away, angry at her for so many transgressions, real and imagined: A cycle before that trip to Earth she had left him to run off with his duplicate aboard Talyn. After his twin had died she'd come back to Moya heartbroken and almost unable even to talk to him. Then she had left him again, this time to run off to 'find herself' as an assassin. When she'd come back the next time she had been desperately ill and was protecting both his worst nightmare made flesh in Scorpius and a bucket load of secrets that she had refused to discuss with him.

But all that was behind them now, or so they both said. They had made their peace. It had been long and painful, and a wise man would know not to go picking at scars like that. He stole a surreptitious glance her way. She was still looking out the view portal, finishing her fruit while their son still played with her boot buckles. He so wanted to go over to her, to try to hug away some of their less happy memories in the hope that they could replace them with better ones. But thoughts of what had led to his anger towards her during their last visit were still eating at him, like an itch he couldn’t scratch.

"Sure dad and Liv'll be cock-a-hoop to see you again," he said, looking away and holding tight to the console. "You and the little-un's," he concluded, stealing another glance her way. John's sister, Olivia, was a midwife - she loved small children and in addition had wasted no time in befriending Aeryn during their previous visit to Earth. This time, Aeryn looked back. Having drawn her eye once again, John nodded, using his eyes to pinpoint first her rounded belly and then young D'Argo playing at her feet. Best to let bygones be bygones and focus on the here and now, be grateful for what he had, rather than sulk about water under the bridge he told himself. Maybe if he kept telling himself that he might even start to believe it, some day.

She smiled nervously back at him. He suspected he knew what she was thinking, and it was nothing to do with when there were two John Crichtons in the Universe. She was probably thinking of how people would react to her now: he had wondered the same thoughts too. Would his father, his family, hell, would Earth, be ready this time to accept her as his mate, and more, to accept their half-human children? They would have to tread so carefully if they didn’t want to end up as someone's little science project, especially now that they didn’t have Big D'Argo and Lo'laan, or even Scorpy and Sputnik, for back-up should things go wrong.

"Pilot, you got a handle on them broadcasts yet?" he snapped.

"Umm, sorry Commander....  I am afraid.... Moya has intercepted some transmissions from your planet, but the number and power of transmissions is much reduced, compared to when we were last here.”

"Say what, Pilot?"

"Some ... umm... time dilation may have taken place in the wormhole. I am attempting to determine..."

"Just so long as it's not before the last time we were here?" If there was one thing he really didn’t want to go doing it was messing with the timeline. Star Trek might have had a ridiculously upbeat approach to most things, but they had gotten that 100% right.

"No, Commander, I do not think we are. I am not quite sure what... I am running tests."

Oh frell, John thought. What the hell could that mean? Well, there was only one way to find out. They would just have to go and take a closer look.

'~'

"OK, Pilot, take us in, but slowly and carefully," Aeryn had joined John at the main console by this time, leaving D'Argo playing beneath the strategy table. She laid a concerned hand on his upper arm.

"What do you think it is, John?" she asked.

"Dunno. But we're here now, so, in for a penny, in for a pound."

Aeryn frowned at his latest incomprehensible John-ism. She activated her comm. "Chiana?"  

"Aeryn?" came the Nebari girl's reply after a couple of microts. "So, are we back in Crichton's backyard, then?"

"Yes. Could you look after D'Argo for us for a couple of arns, please? John and I need time to do some research."

Chiana was silent for a few microts. "Alright." Came the eventual reply. "See you in your chambers in a few macrots." In the monens since the death of her lover, D'Argo, at the battle of Quajaga Chiana had taken to keeping herself to herself: Sometimes no one saw her for days at a time. She had, wisely, soon abandoned her hastily conceived plan to accompany Rygel to Hyneria and had instead sought solace in the familiar halls and chambers of Moya, her home. The Leviathan was big enough to accommodate all of the remaining crew’s needs, and, even if much of the time Chiana did prefer her own company these days, at least she still had friends to hand, should she need them or should they need her.

"I'll just drop D'Argo off," Aeryn announced, lifting their son onto her hip. John nodded in acknowledgement from where he stood at one of the consoles. "Back soon."

'~'

"It's definitely the right time-period?" Aeryn asked for the second time in a less than five minutes. They had been in high Earth orbit for half an hour now, but were little wiser about what was going on now than when they had been beyond the orbit of Mars.

"Yes!" John snapped back at her, instantly regretting his testiness. It wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t fair to blame her. "But there's no satellites, no ISS... Lots of orbiting debris, though." He tweaked the magnification on his screen, focussing in on the planet surface. "Lots of debris on the ground, too."

"It looks to me like there has been some sort of military action." Aeryn continued, scrolling through pictures of the damage down on the planet surface. John nodded. The stupid frelling idiots: had they really gone and blown themselves up in the year or so since he had last been here?

"If you want my professional opinion, the pattern reminds me of a subjugation-bombardment performed from orbit." John glanced across to see Aeryn tapping away at her console, totally absorbed in her tasks. She'd have made a good Vulcan. "Like Peacekeepers or Scarrans would perform."

John opened his mouth and then swallowed the urge to retort that she should know, being a Peacekeeper. Aeryn had been a Peacekeeper once, but that was in her past. He reminded himself to control his shock and anger at seeing the Earth in such a state and not to take the easy route and let it spill over into lashing out at his wife. "... umm... but, if true, where are they hiding?"

Aeryn nodded. "Pilot was adamant. Moya is currently the only space vessel in the entire system."

"So, the bad guys ain't here now."

"Unless they're behind the moon or one of the other planets and we can't see them." She looked up and pulled an unhappy face at him. He shrugged in reply. It was possible. In his experience, anything was possible, likely, even, if it implied trouble for him and his family.

"On the positive side, they did not destroy the planet - there still seems to be plenty of life, even some radio traffic," Aeryn continued. She gave a weak, encouraging smile. She was obviously trying, in her own way, to put an upbeat spin on things for him, bless her.

"So, whoever it was didn’t come to destroy Earth. Maybe they came for something, got it and left?" John fell silent for a while, thinking about the unknowns in his theory and what to do next in practice.

"I would imagine that it would be safest to try to contact your government. I mean, if whoever did this is still here, hiding, then they probably know that we're here anyway. If they're not, well, you will want to check if you are welcome and make sure the humans don’t mistake us for someone else. We would certainly need to do that before we could safely consider going down."

John nodded. Interesting: So, she was still thinking of going down? Maybe she wouldn’t just knock him out and tie him up if he suggested it? "Good thinking, Aeryn. Pilot, could you, umm, could you see if you can open us one of the radio frequencies we used to talk to Earth last time we were here, please?"

"One moment, Commander," Pilot replied from the clamshell. As they waited, taking in the devastation below through the viewing portal now rather than on their consoles, Aeryn moved across behind John. She leant her head on his shoulder, reached around and gave John's hand a comforting rub. How different she was now from the angry, detached woman he had met just a few cycles before. Back then she would have rather died than seek or offer comfort to anyone. He moved his other hand up to cover hers.

"I have managed to contact a Lieutenant Colonel Collins, United States Air Force, Commander." Pilot broke in on their private moment after maybe half a minute.

"Put him on, I guess?" John replied. Why not, after all? They had come home to visit, there didn’t seem to be any point in just sitting up in orbit, watching, wondering, trying to piece together what might have happened when they could just ask?

"Connecting you now," came Pilot's disembodied voice.

"Lt Col Collins?"

"Speaking. And who is this?" John could barely control his laughter. The whole thing seemed like some sort of cliche or déjà vu - him standing on Moya's command, trying to persuade some Earth-bound military or IASA contact that yep, he really was John Crichton. How come it never happened like that on other planets? If there was any conversation at all it normally involved him trying to convince someone that he wasn't the infamous John Crichton and please could they stop pointing those guns at him. He rubbed his face with one hand, dismissing the feeling that this had all happened before, that his life consisted of an endless series of tableaux, comprising him calling up Houston from Moya's command. He'd only been to Earth once before, and that first contact sure as frell hadn’t gone anything like this.

"Would you believe, Commander John Crichton, from IASA? Look I'm up in orbit on Moya. I'm kinda wondering what the hell's happened down there."

There was a long pause from Collins. "John Crichton, you say?" Well, not exactly the response he’d asked for, even if it was the one he’d half expected.

"Yeah, the one and only. Least that's who I was last time I checked. Look, I've not been gone much more than a year: You remember me, right?" How could anyone possibly forget? Their visit the previous year had been conducted under the glare of the world's media. There was another long pause. Aeryn came round from behind him and he shot her a brief, pained expression. She took his hand and squeezed it. Giving comfort sure didn’t come naturally to her, but he had to give her top marks for trying.

"Uhuh. I know who you are. Or who you claim to be. And you're in orbit, you say?"

"Yeah. That's right. Up on Moya." There was a long pause from the other end, filled first by off-microphone discussions then by static once they killed the mike. John frowned. He wasn’t quite sure how he had imagined this might go, but this sure wasn’t it. What the hell was going on? After about ten seconds Collins came back on, heralded by a momentary squeak of feedback.

"Okay, well, we're going to have to speak to a couple of people, but I think we're going to want to see you down here. There's things we need to talk about and, well, it would be best if we did it face to face."

"How so?" There was another silence from Earth, pregnant with as yet unrevealed meaning.

"Are you serious? Look, Commander Crichton, if that's who you really are, just get yourself ready to get your ass down here. We'll talk in an hour and let you know the when and where, OK?"

"No that is not frelling... oh-kay," Aeryn interjected angrily in English.

"Sorry, who is that?" Collins demanded with no hint of apology in his tone.

"Aeryn Sun. And my husband goes nowhere unless I agree to it!" John glanced at her, half grateful to be the beneficiary of her protective passion even if he did wish she'd left the negotiations to him. She was hardly the most diplomatic person in the universe, after all, and her statement that he wouldn’t be going anywhere without her say so was setting off a whole bunch of alarms in his head. He also felt distinctly uneasy that she had revealed her presence and connection so early. He wasn’t sure why he felt that way, but the rattlers had definitely woken up en masse. Her contribution to the conversation seemed to have sparked a hullabaloo at Collin's end, too. Multiple voices filled the ether for several microts before they subsided suddenly and he came back on.

"Umm, we're... gonna... have a talk down here...  and get back to you in about an hour, OK? Collins out." There was a click and then more static. After a microt Pilot must have dialled the volume down because it died away.

Aeryn turned her head to look at John. She was smiling, obviously pleased with herself, and, despite his misgivings, he found it contagious. She so rarely smiled, and when she did, well, she was truly a sight to behold. "Well, that's put the Vorc amongst the pigeons." She remarked, to John's barely stifled amusement.


	5. Chapter 5

 

"So it was the frelling Scarrans, huh? Well, at least the stupid idiots didn't blow themselves up," John spoke, more to himself than to his companions. An hour and a half and another call to Earth later and they were still little further forward: The demand that John come down to Earth had been tempered into a request that he do so, but little more information had been forthcoming.

"You'd have thought someone would have mentioned Moya and us, if they were talking about Scarrans?" Chiana remarked, voicing all of their thoughts.

"Could this be one of these alternate realities?" Aeryn asked John as she fed D'Argo a spoon of strong-smelling, liquidised Sebacean mint stew.

"Possibly. Could explain a lot of things." He rolled his head noncommittally, aware that the gesture probably resembled one of Noranti's.

"You should have let me put more ginka root in that," Noranti fussed at Aeryn, indicating the baby's meal. Aeryn flashed a 'mind your own business' smile at the old woman and turned her attention back to John and D'Argo. Considering their troubled history, Noranti was lucky that was all Aeryn flashed her way.

"Frell!" Chiana looked around her nervously, like she was inclined to bolt from the room. She might well be, John decided. She didn’t take well to this sort of thing these days. She didn’t take well to very much at all these days, not since the death of her lover.

"I'm gonna have to go down." John said quietly, almost as though hoping to slip it in without anyone hearing him.

"Why?" Chiana asked softly. Aeryn nodded in support, her jaw set in determination, and spooned another mouthful of food into her son. Hell, they're ganging up on me John thought. If Noranti and Pilot join in I'm done for. No, scratch that, he thought, it's Aeryn and Chi, I'm already done for.

"It was your idea," he wheedled.

"Things have changed," Aeryn replied, fuming.

"But I still need to go..."

"Why?" Chiana repeated.

"Umm, well because I need to find out what has happened down there. What's happened to my family," John ventured. He saw Aeryn's resolve soften. Family. It was the one card he knew she wouldn’t try to counter, knowing as she did how important it was to him. He felt a total rat for playing it.

"Fine." She snapped, not meeting his eye but rather shovelling more food into D'Argo. "I'll ask Pilot to ready the Prowler. Chiana, can you..?"

"No, Aeryn." She turned and stared at him, her countenance hardening again into a mask concealing who-knew-what emotions. It was her Peacekeeper-Aeryn expression, and that was never a good sign. On top of him saying he still wanted to go down and playing the 'family' card, Noranti had been winding her up for the last ten macrots about what the crazy old drug-pusher regarded as her deficiencies as a mother and a cook. If he didn’t explain himself quickly Mount St Aeryn might just erupt.

"John..." her voice had that warning tone. Chiana was glancing nervously between them whilst Noranti seemed to have pulled out a sachet of herbs and looked like she was trying to pick a good moment to surreptitiously slip them into D'Argo's bowl. Aeryn pushed the bowl away from Noranti, in front of Chiana and passed the infant across to her young Nebari friend. John swallowed nervously at the thought that Aeryn seemed to be 'clearing the decks for action.'

"Look, it's a good bet anyone down there won't feel like rolling out the welcome mat for alien visitors right now. Including you." Freed from the encumbrance of her son, Aeryn shuffled around in her seat to face her husband, who was sitting only denches away, on the other side to Chiana. John writhed under her gaze. She could be frelling intimidating when she wanted to be, and this was definitely one of those moments. "Better if I go alone, in the module." His throat felt dry. He was sure she'd hear the nervousness in his voice. "When I get in dren up to my ears, that's when you can come riding to my rescue, OK, babe? Safest for everyone." He reached out to lay his hand on her belly to indicate that he wasn’t just thinking of her, but of the child she carried, too. She batted his hand sharply away. They locked eyes, like a pair of cats each daring the other to look away first. He willed himself not to crumble, not to look away.

The outwardly calm silence was matched by a foreboding stillness, broken only by Noranti leaning across towards D'Argo's bowl and Chiana curling it into a protective hug. Aeryn didn’t break John's gaze, but she did finally give an almost imperceptible nod. John breathed again. "You promise that you'll be careful. That you won't do anything stupid and you'll comm me at the first sign of trouble?"

"Sure. Of course." He nodded, looking away now, ashamed in his victory and avoiding her gaze. Without warning she seized his face between her hands and made him look her in the eyes. "You promise me!" she hissed at him, a tear in the corner of her eye. "Or I swear I will instruct Pilot to turn Moya around and head back to the wormhole this microt! I mean it, John!"

"I promise, babe," he laid his hands over hers. "No heroics. I'll be careful. I promise" He glanced at her pregnancy bump. "Don't worry, this time, I mean it. Truly. Trust me, everything's going to be OK."

She glared back at him, battling to hide her worry and frustration behind her usual stoical mask.

'~'

John circled Collins's rendezvous point in his module: It looked like a local, private airfield, not a military base at all. The only hint that he had got the right place was the pair of transport helicopters - old models, Loaches, if he remembered the name right, and a couple of camouflaged trucks that stood near the small cluster of buildings. Just like when he had flown over downtown Houston on his approach, no one was moving around, and there seemed to be no traffic other than him, on the ground or in the air.

He had brought the module in from orbit on a long, low trajectory, giving him plenty of opportunity to take in the devastation the Scarrans, or whoever was responsible, had wreaked on his home. Houston had been a mess. Seeing the damage from space was as nothing compared to seeing it more up close and personal.  After a minute flying low across the ruined city John had felt compelled to interrupt his approach to the rendezvous coordinates in order to set down and take it in. He had needed a private moment to come to terms with what had happened, before he met with the reception committee.

It had been a struggle to find a place to set the module down in the ruins of Houston, even with its added alienmanoeuvrability. Finally, he had spotted an area clearer than most and set down on the flattest, most stable looking pile of rubble he could find. He climbed out of the module, donning his leather coat against the unexpected chill. There was no one to be seen anywhere. He walked slightly away from the module, feeling the need to do something, anything, even if it was just walk a few paces, and stood nearby, on a more raised pile of ruins, taking in the jagged steel and concrete remains of tall buildings ripped asunder. His jaw clenched in grim anger. Someone was going to pay for doing this to his home.

He made one more pass over the airfield, just to be sure, then brought the module in to land for the second time that day, coming to rest 100 motras from the choppers and turning the module's nose to angle it back onto the open runway for a quick take off, just in case. He made one last check on Winona, his treasured pulse pistol which Aeryn had given him in his first cycle out in the Uncharted Territories, and on the Tarken body armour, half hidden beneath his long, black duster. Then he took a microt to quickly check in with Pilot and Aeryn and then popped the hatch.

It was warmer here than Houston, and the air had a more natural smell - flowers and grass, rather than ash and gas. John got the impression that this place was too unimportant for the Scarrans to bother with. As he walked towards the two Loaches a trio of men emerged from the nearest building. Two were in civvies and one in a plain green BDU. As they came within shouting distance the three men exchanged a few words and the soldier nodded.

"Commander Crichton?" the soldier called and saluted, not waiting for the obvious affirmative reply.

"Lieutenant Colonel Collins?" John replied, getting close enough now to see the markings on the man's uniform. He was tall, slim set, early middle-aged with the sort of rugged good looks that spoke to John of the typical lead male character in an action-packed TV show. Probably one involving wormholes, John’s subconscious interjected.

"So, it really is you? John Crichton?" Well, at least he didn’t have a ridiculously over the top Southern accent, nor was he wearing a long, blonde wig.

"Who else?" John shrugged and nodded, trying to hide an inappropriate giggle at the thought of Collins as the pwinceth from Chiana’s game-blob.  

"Welcome home. I must admit, none of us expected to see you, least of all...  well, you'll see."

John pursed his lips, tired of all this pussy-footing around. When were they going to stop telling him they'd tell him everything later? Was 'later' ever going to come? "S'ppose you tell me what the frell...?" he demanded, growing more serious.

"Scarrans, Crichton." Well, he knew, or at least suspected that already. But at least they were starting to tell him something now. "The rest can wait till we've confirmed you are who you say you are. If you don’t mind, we'd like to run a couple of tests, just to be sure, before heading on with the debriefing."

John considered Collins's latest statement for a second, reluctant to agree to anything involving medical procedures after his experiences in the UTs at the hands of Scorpius. But, he was home now, and if he wanted to find out what was going on, which he did... well, for now it was their ball game, their rules.

"You're not planning on strapping me down and sticking any probes where the sun don’t shine? Because let me tell, you, I've had quite enough of that to last a lifetime."

"Yeah, I bet you have," Collins smiled, almost laughed at that. "No, not this time," he continued with a friendly smile, gesturing with an outstretched hand towards the nearby buildings. "Shall we?"

'~'

John perched on a low medical trolley, covered in rough blue paper, keeping a wary eye on the two white-coated medics, one male, one female, both military, as they fussed around him and scurried around the examination room, shining lights in his eyes and ears, taking blood, blood pressure, noting down his height and weight. There was a large, opaque length of glass along one wall, which John presumed was a one-way mirror, a main set of double doors, through which he had entered, and two single doors on other walls. He wondered who might be behind the mirror and what might be behind the other doors. No matter - if it became important, he'd find out soon enough. Hopefully the Tarken armour would protect him from most things and, if not, well then there was always Aeryn and her Big Frelling Guns.

A hawk-faced, unsmiling, slightly built man in a black suit and tie entered through the main doors, about thirty feet from where John was sitting. After staring at John with his best poker-face for a few seconds, he gestured Collins over to join him. The colonel complied as though his lead had just been yanked. John pretended to ignore them, feigning interest in the doctors but keeping an ear tuned in to anything the newcomer might say.  

"So, this is the sonofabitch who led the Scarrans here?" the newcomer sneered softly into his fingers. Although the words had clearly not been intended for him to hear, John heard them just fine. Furious, he jumped down from the trolley, in his angry haste nearly knocking over the female doctor who had been standing in front of him.

"Hey, hang on just a microt! Where the frell d'you get that from?!" John was already half way across the room, but the newcomer didn’t flinch or even show much emotion at all. He raised his eyes in challenge to Crichton. In that moment he reminded John so much of Braca. Collins seemed to brace himself to tackle the astronaut should things come to blows.

"What little we learnt from the Scarrans. What we deduced. And what Crichton told us." The newcomer replied in an offhand manner, defiantly staring John down whilst somehow managing to look down his nose at the taller man. He definitely reminded John of Braca now.

"What d'you mean?" John came to a halt two paces from the two men in order to make it clear he wasn’t seeking a physical confrontation. At least not yet. He could only presume the newcomer was talking about the conversation John had had with Jack Crichton, his father, a year ago, telling him he was closing the wormhole to Earth to protect the planet from the Scarrans. "I only spent a minute talking to my dad, telling him I was closing up the wormhole. Before that you had my whole debrief on the lizards from the time I was here last year!"

"Colonel Crichton?" The newcomer frowned, for the first time showing signs of discombobulation. "No I mean the other..."

"Shh..." Collins nearly went cross-eyed with frowning at the Man In Black. John looked from one to the other for a microt. Well, at least all three of them seemed equally confused.

"Give us a moment, please?" Collins asked John. Crichton could tell it wasn’t really a request and he reluctantly conceded, backing off towards the medical trolley and the two curious but conspicuously busy doctors, but he never took his eyes off the pair by the door. Collins and his compatriot looked at each other for a moment, going into a huddle.  As they spoke, John played the last few minutes over and over in his mind, trying to work out the riddle. He didn’t like the solution he was coming to.

The man in black nodded and left the room, whilst Collins shook his head, sighed, rubbed the palms of his hands on his trousers and strolled over to John.

"You're saying you've been here before?" Collins demanded, propping a nonchalant elbow on a nearby workbench.

"Last year. Twice. What Crichton were you talking about?" There was utter silence now. Even the two doctors seemed to have stopped what they had been doing and were staring at John in confusion

A sudden realisation hit John, something he had previously only suspected but which now seemed to be an inescapable conclusion. He hadn't been here before. And there was another Crichton, who wasn’t his dad. "Frell! This isn’t my reality. Close, but no cigar..." He muttered to himself. Everyone was still staring at him as though he'd grown two heads, one of them possibly Delvian. "How long has the other me been back?"

Collins looked too shocked, too out of his depth to comment. His mouth worked, open and shut, open and shut, like a goldfish.

"Nearly three years," a duplicate John Crichton answered from the double door from which he had suddenly entered in the company of the man in black. "And 'Frell' is right."


	6. Chapter 6

 

They reconvened a few minutes later in a different room, one which appeared to have once been a staff canteen. John's eyes had nearly popped from their sockets when they had walked in to find a distinctly non-pregnant Aeryn, dressed casually in jeans and a white T-shirt, waiting for them with arms crossed across her chest, a grim expression on her face and a trio of distant-eyed soldiers guarding her.

"Commander John Crichton, this is... hell, but I guess you've already met?" Collins sighed apropos of Aeryn as he rolled his eyes and waved his arm her way.

"You could say that," the two Johns echoed each other. Aeryn's fingers gripped her upper arms more tightly, making the skin beneath go white. She stared hard at her version of John and then harder at the newly arrived Crichton but said nothing.

Collins gestured for them to sit around a low, formica table on threadbare, industrial, lightly padded chairs. The furniture had seen better days, with chips on the table top and foam showing through ripped and worn fabric in more than one place. A complicated dance ensued: no one seemed to want to sit next to anyone else. Eventually both Johns sighed and sat themselves down in opposite seats. Aeryn, seemingly satisfied now and able to make a decision as to where to sit herself, pulled up a hard, unupholstered plastic chair, placing it equidistant from the two Johns at the head of the table. Collins, and the man in black, now introduced to John as Special Agent Hobbes, settled themselves in two of the four remaining almost-comfortable chairs. The three guards at the edge of the large room remained standing, unmoved, like all-seeing, but unheeding statues.

"So," the John from Moya opened. "What happened? How'd you end up here?"

"We were on Talyn," Aeryn began, guilty eyes flashing away from MoyaJohn as he tried to return her gaze.

"Did that happen in your reality?" TalynJohn interrupted.

"Sure," MoyaJohn confirmed weakly. "You two ran off on Talyn with Cap'n Cranky and the two stooges, leaving me on Moya with the girls and Big D." TalynJohn nodded, satisfied that they seemed to have established an important, shared frame of reference. "Then what happened?"

"Well, after John destroyed the Scarran Dreadnought at Dam Ba Da we said goodbye to Crais, Talyn, Stark and Rygel, made a wormhole to Earth..." Aeryn continued, being unusually loquacious but still not meeting anyone's eye. She rolled her head as she talked, her wide eyes fixed on the table.

"Wait up! Wait a microt!" MoyaJohn exploded, realising with shock where their realities had diverged and furious at what it meant. Even though he had known for some years now that that had been their plan, had his version of TalynJohn not been killed at Dam Ba Da, it was still hard to hear, hard to cope with the cold, hard fact that once upon a time Aeryn had seen him as a disposable copy and had been content to abandon him on the other side of the Universe. "You're saying you left me! You left me, out there in the Uncharted Territories? With the lions and the tigers and bears...?"

"We knew you'd be alright... you were on Moya and you had the rest of the crew..!" TalynJohn protested. Collins and Hobbes shot each other seemingly meaningful glances: Even if they weren’t au fait with all of the details, this had all the makings of deteriorating into fisticuffs. It was probably like watching a particularly strange episode of the Jerry Springer show.

"What happened to Talyn, to everyone in your reality?" Aeryn asked more softly, her voice cutting across the argument. MoyaJohn flashed her a fierce look. She looked concerned and he could understand why. She was probably terrified to hear his answer rather than being scared of him. He didn’t want to be cruel, but the beast was on his shoulder now, whispering angry words and accusations in his ear. MoyaJohn almost blurted out that his twin had died at Dam Ba Da, overwhelmed by radiation. He felt the hurtful words on the tip of his tongue. He knew they would be devastating to Aeryn and likely cause this version of that same twin some distress, but he never got around to voicing them.

"Things, umm, they worked out a bit differently," MoyaJohn began.

"Yeah. And I bet you're just dying to stick the knife in, tell us how badly things turned out?” TalynJohn snarled, staring angry daggers at both Aeryn and MoyaJohn. MoyaJohn stared back defiantly at TalynJohn, sparing a momentary glance to take in Aeryn's crumbling Peacekeeper mask. He didn’t think he had anything to apologise for. It had taken him and Aeryn more than a year to get their act together after his twin's death. It had been a long, painful road for both of them. They had both had issues to resolve before they'd been ready to renew their relationship and the process had not helped by them each wanting to move forward when the other did not.

"You son of a bitch! You utter.... cow! I can't believe you did that to me!" MoyaJohn glanced angrily around the assembly. He was totally focussed on the wrongs he perceived that they had done to him, unable to consider his own culpability, the fact that he would have done exactly the same thing to his twin if it had been him aboard Talyn. TalynJohn was staring defiantly back at him, jaw set. Aeryn seemed close to some sort of emotional breakthrough, or breakdown, eyes moist, biting on her bottom lip.

"Right back at you, bro!" The other John bit back. Collins and Hobbes were clearly all ears, but were still doing a pretty good job of not showing much outward reaction beyond attentively following the conversation, gathering intelligence. No one had tried to hit anyone yet, after all, so no need to intervene.

"You left me!"

"You'd have done the same!" TalynJohn accused himself. “Given half a chance…”

"You..!" MoyaJohn slammed his hand down on the table, stood and stormed out. One of the guards looked nervous but Collins just shrugged, as though such events and revelations were an everyday part of the job for him.

"I should talk to him." Aeryn pleaded to Hobbes. The agent considered it for a second and then nodded his assent, waving a hand to indicate that two of the guards should go with her. With ill-concealed jealousy, TalynJohn watched her stand and follow his twin from the room.

'~'

Aeryn found MoyaJohn standing on the concrete apron just outside the building. He stared up at the sky, trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed her. She moved up behind him, keeping to the long, cool shadow cast by the building.

"Hey." She called softly. He flicked a glance her way. At least her two guards were remaining at a discrete distance.

"Forget it. I don’t want to talk."

"Hey means hey. You have to talk." He spared her a glance. Aeryn had her jaw jutted out in determination. She was clearly not going to let him get away with blanking her out. "Your rules, not mine."

"I wish I'd never taught you that."

"I wish a lot of things," she answered, her delivery wistful. He had no idea she could ‘do’ wistful. It didn’t really fit with her badass-space-pilot image.

"I can't.... I can't believe he did that... you did that. You left me out there to die..."

"I'm so, so sorry John." She reached out and touched his arm with her fingers. He flinched away from her and she let her arm drop to her side. She looked down, took a deep breath and then looked up again. "Anyway, you cannot put all the blame on him. You do understand, don't you? He's you." She spoke softly but firmly.

"He, umm. In my reality, you ended up with me." She arched an eyebrow at that but didn’t enquire further as to what had happened to bring about that turn of events and he didn’t feel like pushing the point. “In the end. After a cycle or so.”

"Really?" He nodded. "Are you happy?" he nodded again.

"We've got a kid. Another on the way."

"Oh." There was a long, almost pregnant, pause. One Aeryn pregnant, the other most likely almost pregnant, John mused, struggling not to find his thought process funny: that really wouldn’t be appropriate and, all things considered, could even get him physically injured. This Aeryn was almost certainly pregnant with D’Argo, his foetus in stasis, waiting to be discovered and released. She probably didn’t even know it. It could be very unwise for him to mention anything at all to her right now.

"She's me,” Aeryn continued, breaking his thought. “The Aeryn in your reality. Same people. Just different circumstances. Besides, I think things worked out better for you, in the long run, don’t you?" John turned his head, noticing the strain around her eyes, her washed-out, gaunt features, her flat belly. "He was right, you know. The other John. My John. In his place you would have done the same."

He nodded. He'd had plenty of time to think it through over the years and he wasn’t dumb, even if he couldn’t stand to be in the same room as himself whenever he'd had the chance to be.

"I'm so... I'm such a bastard. I left myself alone... stranded in the UTs, and ran off home. Sometimes I wonder what you see in me."

"Sometimes I wonder the same thing." She replied. The quiet sadness in her voice pulled John fully around to face her, against his prior intentions. She cast her eyes down again to look at the ground, as though determined not to show more of herself to him. Yep, she was definitely not her usual self. It reminded him a little of how withdrawn she had been after she had returned to Moya from trying her hand as an assassin and he had rejected her.

"What happened to you here, Aeryn? These last couple of years? On Earth?" He gently took her upper arms in his hands, causing her to lift her face to look at him. "You don't look well. Don't seem yourself."

"I've been a prisoner, John," she shook her head, unwilling to say more. She didn’t have to. John could fill in the blanks from there. They'd both known well enough how things could go on Earth, both seen it when they had been on the Ancients' simulation of Earth, so many years ago. "From the moment we arrived." She lowered her voice, as though not really intending her next comment for his ears. "Frelling stupid, pointless idea coming here at all." 

"I'm sorry." He let go with one arm and reached out around her, meaning to pull her into a hug. She pulled a face and took a step back. It seemed to John that she really didn’t need or want that level of intimacy right then. After a few seconds of growing discomfort he withdrew the offer, returning his hand to her upper arm. She shrugged one shoulder.

"I'm sure he didn't mean it to happen..." John paused, recognising the look on her face as the "Frell, don't you ever shut up?" one. Best to shut the frell up then….

"But he should have known better." John couldn’t deny her assessment. When he had returned to his version of Earth the previous year, and when he had returned this time, too, he had tried so hard to protect her. So how could he... her John Crichton... have got it so wrong when they had come to Earth? But then so much had happened to MoyaJohn that had not happened to his twin, experiences which gave him extra insight, extra caution. Or perhaps he had simply gotten lucky and the other John and Aeryn hadn’t? He shivered at the uncomforting thought.

 "C'mon Aeryn, we'd better get back inside. There's plenty more we've got to talk about, and most of it is going to end up upsetting someone." He squeezed her arms gently at that, causing a small shiver to run down her spine.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Oh, erm, nothing." He casually dismissed her very pertinent question. "Later."

'~'

"That was quick. Coffee?" Hobbes remarked as Aeryn and MoyaJohn, both rather subdued, re-entered the room.

"Yeah I reckon that'll hit the spot." MoyaJohn sighed heavily and dropped back into his chair before sweeping a hand over his face.

"So," TalynJohn addressed his twin. "Collins tells me there's another Aeryn up on Moya? How's that work then? What happened to me?"

MoyaJohn glanced across at Aeryn as she settled back onto her own seat. Everyone was silent and staring at him, waiting for answers. Frell, the moment had finally come, no putting it off any longer. There was no avoiding the issue by riding the heat of the moment this time. Damn it, he thought, this is going to rip her apart. But then, maybe he could try and distract everyone, avoid the question?

"Umm, not important. Suppose we cut to the chase: Who attacked Earth?" MoyaJohn tried the only subject he knew which could trump discussions of his and Aeryn's tortuous private life.

"He's dead, isn’t he? My John in your reality?" The directness of Aeryn's question cut through MoyaJohn's attempts to change the subject. He guessed she'd been thinking it through ever since their aborted conversation outside. Now there really was no point in putting it off any longer  - it would only hurt her more if he did.

He nodded his head gently. "Yeah," he whispered. "At Dam Ba Da. Radiation got him." Aeryn's hand shot up to cover her mouth, barely stifling a strangled sob. TalynJohn turned white.

"I'm sorry, I need a microt..." MoyaJohn didn’t look up as Aeryn stood, her chair toppling backwards, unheeded, as it crashed to the floor.

"Do you mind?" TalynJohn indicated he wished to go after her. Hobbes conceded with a snort and a wave of his hand. TalynJohn didn’t waste a second - he was standing and heading for the door before Hobbes finished gesturing.

“’scuse me.” Collins cleared his throat, stood up and followed Aeryn and TalynJohn from the room.

"Up and down like yo-yos," Hobbes muttered to himself. "Sure you don't want to..?" MoyaJohn glared Hobbes into silence.

"Anyway..." MoyaJohn leaned back and watched the door shut behind Collins. Getting revenge on this John and Aeryn for their transgressions against his equivalent seemed such a hollow victory now. He grimaced. It was time to find something else to talk about, rather than wallow in what a bastard he could be.

"You were saying..?" Hobbes's question snapped John out of his reverie.

"What happened to Earth?" John was pretty sure everyone else present knew the answer to his own burning question: No need to wait for all of the others to come back to ask it and have it answered. He fixed Hobbes with a beady eye. The agent snorted his contempt back at John. "My Aeryn says it looks like a space-bombardment. Pilot says the gossip on the airwaves sounds like it might have been Scarrans."

"It was the Scarrans." Hobbes confirmed with a shrug. "Leastways, that's how they both called it." He gestured towards the door with his thumb. His hand strayed into his jacket pocket, pulling out a crumpled cigarette packet and a lighter. "No one else on Earth to put a name to the bastards except them two. Anyway, those scaly fuckers came without warning. Destroyed our defences, then sent in ground forces. Whole thing was over in a day and a half."

"But why? I mean why come here at all? And why come so far and then leave?"

"Good questions, Commander. We asked the same at first. We even thought maybe they'd followed your twin to Earth after Dam Ba Da. Revenge for destroying their Dreadnought."

Hobbes paused, arched an eyebrow, tapped a cigarette out of its packet, took it between his lips and lit it.

"Do you mind? Those things'll kill you, y'know?"

Hobbes laughed. It was a hollow, humourless sound. "I've seen Scarrans, up close and personal," he held up his cigarette and twitched it, flicking his eyes its way so it had John's attention. "I should be so lucky."

"Anyway, turns out it most likely was you." Hobbes fixed a beady eye on John, driving home his point with his clear contempt for the astronaut.

"Don’t be stupid. You think that they followed me?" John leant back and puffed out a breath, expressing his scepticism. The smoke was starting to get on his nerves, despite the size of the room. It stank and made his eyes sting. "How's that work then? Because I've never been here before, not in this reality."

Hobbes shook his head. "You, him, some other fucking John Crichton, what's it matter? YOU must have let something slip. Or maybe your equivalent did. Left out there in the UTs by your twin and by..."  he paused as though even saying her name was distasteful to him. "Officer Sun. What else could possibly explain it? You understand, we don’t know all the details. The Scarrans didn’t exactly feel like giving us the full Basil Exposition treatment. But somehow they found out about Earth. They knew what they wanted: they came here to harvest something. Haven't worked out what."

"A plant. Bird of paradise, Crystherium utilia. Big deal for them." John expounded, less cocky now. He could imagine how it might have happened: He'd accidentally spilled the beans about the plant to Emperor Staleek in his reality - it could've been something similar for the other John. Assuming he'd been lucky and not been captured and tortured for what he knew, of course. John looked up and saw Hobbes arch an eyebrow at that new piece of information. Then the agent gave an inverted smile and slowly nodded his head twice in thanks to Crichton for completing the picture.

"Interesting. And I guess someone..." He pointed the two fingers holding the smoking cigarette at John. "Might've let them know that this crysteri-whatsit... grows on Earth?" John reddened. It was déjà vu all over again.

"Not knowingly I didn’t." He blustered, trying to cover the justifiable guilt which he now felt. "Anyway. Aeryn and the other me, they abandoned me out there. Maybe I, well, maybe my... equivalent number... somehow led the Scarrans here. To Earth? Trust me, that was never the plan. Never the intention!" John blinked as he protested his innocence, trying to take it all in. He shook his head at the awful symmetry of it. He couldn’t escape it. He knew that in his reality he'd told the Scarrans the plant grew on Earth. It was why he'd had to shut the wormhole. He'd probably somehow made the same frelling mistake in whatever reality the scaly sons-of-bitches who'd attacked this Earth had come from, too. But of course he had, knowing his track record for having the Universe frell with him: what else could possibly explain it? As the man said, they knew to come to Earth for the Crystherium. Who the hell else but John Crichton could have told them that?

"So we're all sons of bitches now?" John said quietly to himself as he accepted the inevitable: Once again, it would appear, Fate had stitched him up real good.

"Indeed, so it would seem," Hobbes replied with a heavy sigh, grinding his cigarette out in the ashtray.


	7. Chapter 7

 

John Crichton, only a few hours back on Earth, sat in a high school canteen having lunch with himself and a woman who was his wife but yet not his wife. He had a vague recollection of having come to this school for a football game, back when he was a kid. Back before he'd been shot through a wormhole to a distant part of the Universe, back before aliens had ravaged the Earth to secure supplies of pretty flowers. What was most astounding to him was that none of this was in any way a shock to him. Over the last five years the bar for what could shock or surprise him had been lifted pretty frelling high.

Apparently the high school had been chosen as a temporary base for Collins and Hobbes's small group of military and federal agents as it had extensive facilities, like this canteen, and was not identifiable from space or from any records as any sort of military threat. Plus, he guessed, because it was also only a ten minute drive from the requisitioned civil airfield where his module was parked.

"We reckon they'll be back, sooner or later, when they want something more." John's twin explained to him while toying with a bowl of ice cream.

"Or something else." The Aeryn who wasn’t his wife muttered darkly between mouthfuls of chocolate cake. John noticed that she had shot both him and his twin a glance, which he now realised might mean that that something else might be him. She seemed to be enjoying her cake, despite her general gloom. He'd have to remember to take some back to Moya for his Aeryn. Then he kicked himself, remembering that she'd probably tried it when they were on their version of Earth last year, and that he'd have known that already if he hadn’t behaved like a total rat bastard to her for the whole time that they had been there.

"Only if they know I'm here." His other self grunted and shrugged.

MoyaJohn couldn’t help but notice that, even though he had assumed that the other him and Aeryn were a couple, he hadn’t seen much physical contact between them. Actually, he hadn’t really noticed any significant contact. It was almost like Aeryn was holding herself distant, like she had during his second year on Moya, when part of her had wanted to be with him but another, stronger part, could not bring herself to do so. It was all very odd, seeing as how, as he understood it, they had come to Earth together and left him... yet another him, but the equivalent of him three years ago, stranded out in the Uncharted Territories. Still, it was not his business. Things were going fine between him and his Aeryn. Well, fine by their standards. This bastard was on his own. Served him right for leaving him out there and running off with Aeryn. He felt the first twinges of a stress headache coming on just thinking about it.

"And you've no other weapons to use against them?" MoyaJohn asked and licked his fingers. He had chosen the fried chicken. The others might already have moved on to, or even finished dessert, but John was royally gorging himself on chicken, French fries, onion rings... The smell alone had gripped him with carnal desire as soon as he'd walked into the room, making him salivate like a Pavlovian dog. Aeryn was going to be furious. He was going to have to find some toothpaste later. And a brush. Maybe some mouthwash, too...

"Nothing worth squat." John's twin replied, eyeing the pile of chicken bones with a pair of arched eyebrows and an open-mouthed half-smile.

"But what about the displacement engine thing? The one you used at Dam Ba Da?" Frell, he'd never, not in his wildest dreams, imagined he'd ever be having a conversation with his, to him, dead twin, far less a conversation about what, in his own world, had killed that twin.

"We've got it all right. I brought it back, strapped to Furlow's module."

"It destroyed a Scarran Dreadnought, right? So, why not use it?"

"One shot, burnt out."

"Frell!"

"Damned straight."

"Besides, it runs on partanium. No partanium on Earth." TalynJohn explained, leaning across the table to steal an onion ring off his twin. MoyaJohn gave him a scolding stare, but otherwise let it pass.

"Maybe it could run on something else?"

"What, you reckon the Mr Fusion reactor will run on garbage?" TalynJohn mocked, gathering some of the greasy detritus of their meal into a pile as though he were hoarding valuable fuel.

"Maybe. I'll get the beer, you get the banana skin." MoyaJohn couldn’t help himself from grinning. At last, someone who got his references!

"It's just a coffee machine, you know?" TalynJohn grinned back, evidently thinking much the same. "The Mr Fusion Reactor? A coffee machine with bits stuck on it."

"Hey, don’t knock it. If I'd had a coffee machine out in the UTs these last couple of cycles, I could have managed anything."

"I'd have traded any amount of coffee not to have spent the last couple of years in a rat cage," TalynJohn responded with softly wistful bitterness.

MoyaJohn looked at TalynJohn with a new found sympathy. Things must have sucked big time for his twin, imprisoned on Earth, to have wanted to have given it all up - to have admitted to him of all people that he'd even considered giving all of it up.

"Look..." MoyaJohn paused as he struggled to find an appropriate and polite name to call himself. After a couple of microts he abandoned the attempt. "We may not have always seen eye to eye..."

"I can't say as I've even thought about you that much at all. Except these last few weeks, when I thought you'd led the Scarrans to Earth."

"Oh, for frell's sake!" MoyaJohn gritted his teeth and bit back the urge to hit himself up the side of the head. Aeryn seemed to concur. She glared at her version of John, rolled her eyes, stood and stalked off. "If anyone can make a weapon to stop the Scarrans it's us. Earth needs us to put our heads together and work this out, not to keep butting our heads!"

"Yeah, yeah. You're right." TalynJohn's eyes followed Aeryn, his hunger obviously running deeper than just a few onion rings. Aeryn was attacking a canned drink dispenser and not looking their way: John's money was on the Peacekeeper over the cola machine. The other him and Aeryn really seemed to be in a bad place.

"Of course I am." MoyaJohn paused for a moment as he decided to throw his other self a bone. "I'm you, after all."

TalynJohn puffed out a humourless laugh. "Yeah, OK."

"So, where's this displacement engine then? We ought to get to work."

'~'

"So, everything's fine, John?" Aeryn asked, drumming impatient fingers on one of Moya's control consoles.

"Yeah, there's no sign of Natira," he replied, giving her the code that he was not being held against his will and there was no need for her to come and break him out. "But I need to stay down here for a couple of days: They just need a bit of help..." John started to explain.

"I may be needing a little bit of help soon, too, John!" Aeryn interrupted, her voice firm. One of her genetic modifications, as a carrier-born front-line soldier, meant that her pregnancy was proceeding at an alarming rate by human standards: the baby would be due in a matter of days. How could John had possibly have forgotten that, she wondered? If he didn’t get back up here soon, nature might just take its course without him being present.

"Officer Sun?" Colonel Collins interrupted. "We need a weapon to use against the Scarrans. We have Furlow's module from Dam Ba Da, and both of the Crichtons are going to try to get it working. But we'd like you to come down, too. Help with the work on the module or the displacement engine..."

"I am no scientist. Or tech. I'm sure I couldn’t be of any help to you," Aeryn replied tersely, backed up by a nod of agreement from Chiana, who stood beside her on Moya's command deck. The Nebari girl had been present and offered support to her friend through the shocking revelation that there was another version of both Aeryn and John down on Earth, and that they had been there since the events at Dam Ba Da. That revelation had been bad enough in itself, but Aeryn didn’t really want to explain her real reason for declining to help to the humans. She was adamant that she was not going to place herself and her unborn child at their mercy. However, she was also determined that, if necessary, she was ready to fly down there in her Prowler to drag her John back to Moya.

"I'm sure you could be of enormous value to our..."

"Counter proposal." Aeryn interrupted brusquely. "My ship has extensive files on the Scarrans, their tactics, their weapon systems and so forth. I am willing to share that knowledge, along with my own personal experiences of Scarrans. In return I would expect you to find John's close relatives, tell them about us, offer them the opportunity to come to Moya."

Collins did not reply straight away. Aeryn imagined she could almost hear him thinking, wondering whether John's family held any strategic value, whether agreeing to her terms might be a bad deal for him. He was a soldier, perhaps too suspicious of others for his own good. Almost certainly he was suspicious of an ‘alien’ such as herself. But what she had asked for was a good deal for him, he got plenty of knowledge of strategic value in exchange for nothing of much value to him, but he probably had trouble accepting it simply because it was such a good deal. Admittedly, Olivia, John's sister, was some sort of med-tech, a specialist in childbirth and so could be very useful to Aeryn in a day or two, but Collins didn’t need to know that.

"We have our own Officer Sun to tell us about Scarrans." Collins finally replied. Aeryn rolled her eyes in despair. Frell humans and their intransigence!

"I was coming to her. My understanding is that my knowledge of Scarrans would considerably exceed hers. I have had more occasions to... observe them in close quarters. But she could have already told you all that I know about the displacement engine, so I can't see how you need me down there. Anyway, I need her to fly John's relatives up to Moya if John is working on the weapon."

"We don’t have a ship capable..."

"My husband's module. The one he came down in earlier. I... she knows how to fly it."

"You're asking a lot!" Collins scoffed.

"Am I? I think it's a good deal for you. Everything Pilot and I can tell you about Scarrans for people of no value to you? Why don't you think about it for an arn and let me know. I think you will come to agree, it is very generous."

'~'

The last place MoyaJohn had expected to be taken was to a car customization workshop in a light industrial zone on the outskirts of Springfield.

"We got plenty of equipment here and can get more in without raising any eyebrows, it's a good place logistically and, crucially, there's nothing in these parts of the slightest interest to the Scarrans." Lt Col Collins, still looking and sounding military in spite of the civvies he was now wearing, explained to John as they climbed out of a blacked-out SUV into the quiet, bland, concrete parking lot.

They passed through an outer office and then a workshop, which was clearly a 'front' for the real business which took place within, and then on, through a transitional area secured by armed, military guards and on into the proper workshop beyond.

"Well, pimp my ride!" MoyaJohn exclaimed, laughing and clapping his hands together. His eyes gleamed and he drew a deep breath at his first sight of Furlow's replica of his module. It was accurate in almost every detail, excepting the 'roof-rack' which he already knew had once held the displacement engine. The engine itself, which appropriately enough resembled a car's roof box, lay partially disassembled on a large workbench off to one side.

"Why'd Furlow bother painting it with IASA logos and everything?" MoyaJohn asked with a frown as he realised the extraordinary extent to which Furlow had replicated his craft.

"You know, I've never thought of that before..." TalynJohn quirked a smile. "That's a frelling good question. Maybe you can bring something new to the party after all?"

"Well, gee, thanks," MoyaJohn snarked, staring back at his twin with thinly-veiled resentment. He came to a decision - he'd come here to work, not to bitch. "C'mon, show me the flux capacitor - we gotta get this show on the road."

"Where we're going, we don’t need roads," TalynJohn replied with a grin. MoyaJohn couldn’t help but laugh. Perhaps they could get on after all? At least for some of the time, anyway.

'~'

"You should come." Lt Col Collins stated flatly, having called Moya for the third time that day. Aeryn cursed under her breath. She wondered if John might have somehow let slip about her pregnancy. Why else could Collins be so insistent about her coming down? "Our military infrastructure may have taken a hit, but you'd still be better off down here than on your own up there."

"I am not on my own. I have my crew." Collins didn’t need to know that that crew comprised one frightened young woman who had backed out of delivering her last child, one crazy old woman who Aeryn wouldn’t trust anywhere near her in a medical emergency and an oversized crustacean, who was simply too large and too immobile to be of any help in the birthing no matter how much they both might wish differently. Moya was hardly the mighty Peacekeeper Command Carrier, Zelbinion, or even the smaller Carrier, the Kalvanion, on which she had been stationed for most of her career. "Besides, neither John nor I are comfortable taking such a risk with our safety. In view of the hospitality shown to the other me..."

"Officer Sun, please.... all that is in the past now. You... and.... the, the other you... you're valued allies in our defence against the Scarrans."

"I'm sure...I know." Aeryn paused to collect her thoughts. She was remembering some of the views about her and her potential offspring expressed in the various R. Wilson Munro documentaries, "There are plenty of your species down there who feel otherwise. Some of them medical technicians and scientists, no doubt."

"You'd be treated with the greatest respect, and provided with the utmost security for your protection." Collins insisted. Aeryn wasn't buying any of it.

"No. I will come down if and when we feel it is safe." Aeryn was pretty sure she had no wish to gain further first-hand experience of what the humans meant by 'the utmost security.'  The fact that the humans had kept her doppelganger imprisoned for two cycles told her that they could be quite ruthlessly efficient in that regard, when they put their minds to it. "Now, what about the other matter? Have you located any of John Crichton's family yet?"

Collins sighed, as though accepting defeat, even if only temporarily. "We have one so far. Olivia Crichton." Aeryn rubbed her bump with one hand and smiled. That was excellent news: John's sister could come in rather useful in a couple of days’ time. The humans had probably thought she would be a less valuable asset than Jack Crichton and so would be a better exchange for them - how wrong they were.

'~'

Although they seemed to be making good progress on the displacement engine, the two Johns were driving Aeryn to distraction with their constant bickering. What the frell was his problem? Why did he find himself so frelling irritating: not that she didn’t, right now, but…? It was just like she remembered, back on Moya two, no, three cycles ago, before circumstances had split them up and sent them on their different paths. Circumstances. Such a funny word to describe those events: They had split up in order to try to evade the Peacekeeper retrieval squad led by her own murderous mother. Then she had finally given her heart to one of them only to end up as a prisoner on his home planet…

The raised voice of one of the two Johns snapped her out of her reverie. They were still at it! Did he ever stop talking!?

"Anyway, what are you complaining about? In my reality I've spent a couple of years locked in a cage, with the occasional anal probe for light entertainment. And in your reality I died. And Aeryn: it doesn't look like I'm my Aeryn's favourite person right now whereas you got to marry her!" She glared at them. Didn't he... they realise that she was right here, within earshot? It seemed not! Nothing seemed to matter to either of them when they got going with one of their arguments. Frell them both!

MoyaJohn shook his head. "Would you rather be out there, with Scorpius and the Scarrans, like your version of me?" It was giving Aeryn a headache. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she could stand.

"Now you're just being picky."

"You started it."

"Picky, picky, picky!"

Aeryn decided she needed what John would call 'some air'. She slammed the hunk of metal she had been cleaning and checking down onto the workbench in front of her and stormed off towards the entrance. She checked over her shoulder one last time as she reached the door. Her eyes confirmed what her ears had already told her. Neither John paused for a moment in their bickering, not even noticing her departure. The pair of fekkiks!

As she passed through the heavy, swinging doors, into the auto bodyshop, she was so overcome with fury at both versions of John Crichton that she almost charged headlong into Collins, who had evidently been about to enter the secret part of the workshop through the same route.

"Sorry," Aeryn blustered, about to sidestep him. "If you're looking for Crichton, the stupid drannit is in there, arguing with himself!"

"Actually, umm," Collins scratched his head and bit his lip. He gave a little half smile, as though uncertain about how to raise something. It was a most uncharacteristic display from him. "It was you I was looking for."

Aeryn frowned and quizzed him to explain with a single shake of her head.

"Umm, you can fly the module, right? The original one?" Aeryn nodded, cautiously, wondering where the frell this might be leading.

"Why... why do you ask?" she ventured. The sound of one of the Johns screaming at the other one wafted through the door. She barely stifled a groan. Collins chuckled.

"Got a job for you." She glared at him and he held up his hands placatingly, reminding her of how John had often used the same gesture in his first few monens aboard Moya. "It's all cool, no hidden agenda - we just need someone taken up to Moya and we've no other ships and no one else that can fly the module. Besides, it'll get you away from those two for a few hours," Collins arched an eyebrow and cracked a grin as a loud crash sounded from next door. Somewhat surprised at herself, she nodded and grinned back.


	8. Chapter 8

 

Aeryn stood in the docking bay, her pulse cannon trained on John's original module as it rolled to a halt. Her back was as ramrod-straight as she could manage in such an advanced state of pregnancy and it was starting to ache. Chiana lurked nervously behind a packing crate, providing extra cover with her pulse pistol. Aeryn may have asked for these visitors, may have set the whole thing up, but that didn’t mean she was about to blindly trust that someone wasn’t going to try to double-cross her. She hoped everything would go to plan, that the module would contain no surprises, but just in case she had packed D'Argo off with Noranti to wait in Pilot's den. If things did go to plan, Aeryn was hopeful that the newcomers would be able to help her when the time to give birth came, rather than Chiana or, Cholak forbid, Noranti. Although the old woman could be very reliable and focussed at times, she could also be off in her own strange Universe the rest of the time. And besides, there had always been a degree of tension between Aeryn and Noranti which could be boiled down to drugs and John, John and drugs.  If it hadn't been for Noranti being under John's protection, Aeryn would have kicked her off of Moya a long time ago.

The module's canopy opened and a lithe, black-leather clad female climbed out. Aeryn's heart almost skipped a beat. Even though she knew that it was coming, it was still a shock seeing herself, or another version of herself, here on Moya.

"Well, frell me dead," Aeryn muttered to herself, adjusting her hold on her weapon. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Chiana give her a wan, perhaps even slightly nauseous looking smile. The Nebari girl was probably remembering her own twinning, how the other version of her had been killed and how Kaarvok had eaten her brain in front of her. They were, she imagined, not memories which it would be good for the emotionally fragile Chiana to be reminded of. But Aeryn couldn’t dwell on that right now: her eyes went back to the module, just in time to see the other version of herself reach inside and help a confused, human woman climb out into the landing bay.

Olivia looked around her with the mixture of wide-eyed innocent excitement and shock that Aeryn distantly remembered that John had shown, once, many cycles before.

"So, where's John...? My god, there's two of you!" Aeryn heard Olivia exclaimed, wide-eyed, bringing home to her with a crash of emotions that this version of Olivia had never met her before today, had never had the chance to be her friend and confidant. Then the baby kicked her so hard she almost doubled over in discomfort. By the time she struggled back upright, Olivia had reached her side, her hand on Aeryn's arm. The other Aeryn now stood a few paces away, watching matters warily.

"Chiana," the newcomer Aeryn acknowledged her one-time shipmate with a nod whilst MoyaAeryn recovered her composure. "You look well," Chiana stared back at her, unsmiling, hardly acknowledging her at all.

"My God, how many weeks are you?" Olivia spoke to MoyaAeryn now. "You must be at least thirty five or...."

"It is not the same for us," TalynAeryn stated, frowning now at Chiana. Olivia stared, slack-jawed, eyes moving from one Aeryn to the other. Of course it wasn't the same, her every facial expression seemed to broadcast. That would be because these were aliens. Identical twin aliens.

"We can explain later," MoyaAeryn added.

"Stuff to do," Chiana continued.

"Wh... where's John?" Olivia repeated, blinking, still undecided which of the three other women to look at: one of the two fierce, leather clad, human looking women or their almost albino companion. "They said he'd come home? W... with you?" Olivia pulled a face and pointed a shaking finger at MoyaAeryn.

"Dren!" Hissed MoyaAeryn. "They didn’t tell her he's planetside?" she asked of her twin in Sebacean.

TalynAeryn shook her head. "It would seem not. She probably wouldn’t have agreed to come if they had, so..."

"Wh... what... kind of language was that?"

"We ought to get her translator microbes," TalynAeryn continued calmly in Sebacean. MoyaAeryn and Chiana both nodded. They had not thought about that. But then this Aeryn had had a couple of cycles here on Earth to think about how lacking in translator microbes humans were.

TalynAeryn moved closer to her twin. She inclined her head towards the Prowler, which was sitting across the docking bay from John's module.

"I see you got a new Prowler?"

MoyaAeryn gave the curtest of nods in the affirmative as the two came to face each other. "After I came back from Talyn. After John died, I'll explain later," MoyaAeryn replied still speaking in Sebacean, giving a subtle nod towards Olivia. Both Aeryns understood that John's death, combined with the continued existence of two other Johns and the unknown fate of perhaps yet a fourth, was not something that they wanted to be discussing right now in front of his younger sister. Things were complicated enough.

“Where IS John?” Olivia demanded once again, sounding a little nervous and looking a little scared.

'~'

Olivia nervously looked around her. She wasn’t sure which was proving the hardest to cope with: that the galley-like room in which she was now seated was part of an alien spaceship; or that the fierce, heavily pregnant, human looking woman with her claimed to be her brother's alien wife.

"So, John is down on Earth now? Working on some sort of weapon to protect us?"

"Both Johns are." Aeryn nodded, earnestly asserting her words as truth. The black haired woman didn’t have the air of someone who made up fanciful stories, even if her story did sound utterly outlandish.

Olivia blinked. She was having trouble coping. "B... both Johns? Right. Your John, and, this... this other John. This alternative reality John? The one who is with the other one of you?" Olivia nodded towards the open doorway to indicate that she was talking about the currently absent version of Aeryn. To Olivia's surprise, the dark haired woman simply shrugged and pulled a face which, had she been human, Olivia would have taken to mean either that it didn’t really matter, or was not the whole story. She felt a cold unease grip her. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to know which. Aeryn pushed a bottle across the table to her and grimaced supportingly.

"Here, this might help." The alien woman suggested, a long forefinger tapping on the neck of the bottle.

"Wh... what is it?"

"Fellip nectar. Tastes a bit like beer. It's just what you need right now."

"You're not drinking?" Olivia was instantly suspicious. The alien wanted her to drink something but was showing no signs of joining her. Could it be poison?

"No. Alcohol," Aeryn patted her baby bump and smiled. "John says it is not good for the baby." Olivia wasn’t sure whether it was Aeryn's smile or the simple honesty of the explanation that convinced her, although it did strike her as odd that Aeryn didn’t seem to have an opinion of her own as to what was good or bad for a baby. She took a sip.

"Hmm. It's good." It did taste a little like beer.

"I'm not really sure whether either set of us is from the same reality as this Earth." Aeryn returned to their previous topic while Olivia drank. "All I know for sure is that we're not both from the same reality. Her and me."

"How can you tell?" Olivia blurted out without really thinking where this could lead. Aeryn gave her a long blank look, causing her to shiver. Olivia started to realise that however it was that Aeryn knew that she and her twin didn’t come from the same reality, it didn’t seem that the answer was likely to be especially pleasant. Or forthcoming. There was a period of silence. Olivia suspected that it was something which Aeryn would be unlikely to be willing to divulge.

"In my reality..." Aeryn began to explain, surprising Olivia. Her cracked voice betrayed that she was upset by something. Olivia braced herself to hear whatever it might be. "John and I did not go to Earth three cycles ago. But we did come here about a cycle ago."

"Only last cyc... year?" The alien woman nodded and seemed to wipe away a tear from her eye. It was all very perplexing: why should that simple thing upset her so?

Aeryn nodded. "We spent a lot of time together... last year. You and I. You leant me books, clothes. Tried to help me... to fit in." Olivia stared at the somewhat daunting woman before her. Reading between the lines, she seemed to be saying that in this other reality of hers they had been friends. Was that why Aeryn had been so keen for her to visit the spaceship, Moya?

Olivia was startled by Aeryn's cold hand suddenly falling on her own. As her jaw dropped, the alien woman pulled Olivia's hand across to rest on her baby-bump. "John and I... Our child will be born soon. Family is important... He would love to know that you would be here for that." Aeryn smiled nervously and Olivia felt the child moving in Aeryn's belly. She felt a sudden connection with the stranger sitting before her. Even though they had never met before today, if what she said was true, if she was John's wife, this was John's child. Everything begun with family - it was what they'd been raised to believe.

"I'd like that too." Olivia heard herself say, feeling slightly detached from reality even as she said it. Darn, that fellip nectar was strong stuff.

'~'

"How have you been, Chiana? TalynAeryn asked as they made their way through Moya's golden, ribbed corridors towards Pilot's den.

"Fine," Chiana shrugged out a surly, monosyllabic answer. She didn’t feel much like being friendly to this Aeryn. What her own Aeryn had got up to a couple of cycles ago was bad enough - leaving John on Moya to run off with his twin on Talyn. But at least she had, albeit briefly, returned before running off again to be an assassin and then dragging fekkik-face back with her to Moya. Apparently, though, this Aeryn had never come back from Talyn - she'd cut and run off to Earth with John's twin and left John - Chiana's John - to rot in the Uncharted Territories. Chiana fumed at the thought of her betrayal. 

"What happened to your eyes?" Aeryn asked, breaking in on her reverie.

Chiana pondered what to say for a moment. If what the others had said was true, this Aeryn hadn’t seen her since the planet Kanvia, nearly three cycles ago, when she had left with Crais, Rygel, Stark, and, of course, the other John on Talyn. Then she had gone to Earth with that John, leaving her John, Chiana’s John, alone in the Uncharted Territories. Chiana had lived through the distress that her own John had been caused by her own Aeryn's actions in leaving him. It had torn him apart. She could barely conceive how much worse it must have been for the John that this Aeryn had abandoned in her own reality: She'd never gone back to him - in all probability that John had had to suffer Crais or Rygel telling him that Aeryn had run away with his twin, abandoning him for ever and without her in the Uncharted Territories. In the last few days, since they had arrived on Earth, Chiana had had ample opportunity to dwell on how she felt about all of that: As a consequence, she was in a black rage with her one-time friend.

"What do you care?" Chiana snarled.

"Chiana!" Aeryn responded, her voice sounding shocked by her one-time friend's hostility.

"Sorry, I forgot - you wouldn’t know: The thing with my eyes all started when you were off on Talyn. Frelling yourself stupid with your copy of Crichton. Or maybe it happened after you decided to abandon John and run off to Earth with your Crichton and abandon us? I don’t frelling know anymore: You wanna take a guess?"

Aeryn stopped dead, grabbing Chiana's arm to stop her and pull her round to face her.

Chiana squealed like an angry polecat. "Get your hand off me!" Chiana screeched, snatching her arm away from Aeryn's grip and taking a step back towards the corridor wall.

Anger and frustration flashed across Aeryn's features, causing Chiana to shrink away from her, fearful that she might have provoked the one-time Peacekeeper to do her some harm.  Aeryn took a deep breath and then sighed as she exhaled.

"Chiana, believe me, I am sorry. I wish things had been different, I truly do. But what is done is done. I cannot go back now and change what happened. No matter how much..."

"Can't you?" Chiana's body language spoke of challenge and bravado, but she was careful to step another pace back from Aeryn, putting her out of lashing-out range. Unfortunately that step left her pressed up against the corridor's wall, hemmed in by two of the massive, curved, golden ribs. She really had backed herself up against the wall.

"You know I can't." Aeryn was calm. Chiana imagined she'd had plenty of time to resign herself to how badly she had frelled things up. "And things didn’t exactly work out well for John and me, either, on Earth. You know we've spent the last score of monens prisoners here on Earth, don’t you?” Chiana shrugged one shoulder, conceding a little, but not forgiving her yet. "There is so much that I regret, so much I have lost. I… I missed you these last few cycles.” Aeryn held out a hand towards Chiana. “Have I lost your friendship, too?"

The young Nebari's heart was in her throat. She sniffed back a tear and hardened her countenance. "There's a lot of things happened, Aeryn. A lot of things to forgive."

Chiana stepped away from the wall, turned her back and carried on walking towards Pilot's den. "Besides, I've got my own Aeryn. Just like you've got your own Crichton."  The Nebari turned her head as she finished, to see Aeryn staring after her, seemingly shocked and saddened in equal measure by Chiana's anger and rejection of her.

'~'

Chiana left Aeryn once they got to Pilot's den, muttering something incomprehensible about having something important to do. With some trepidation, lest Pilot should reject her as well, Aeryn made her way across the walkway towards the centre of the enormous chamber.

"Officer Sun." Pilot greeted her without looking up or pausing in his activities. "I had heard that you were aboard." He paused a beat while he dealt with one of Moya’s controls. Modifying the air recirculation rate, Aeryn remembered, surprising even herself. "Moya and I are pleased to see that you are well."

"And me you, Pilot." She paused before Pilot's console, trying to catch his eye. He seemed unwilling to cooperate. "It... it has been a long time." She ventured.

"Indeed it has." Aeryn waited for more, for some acknowledgement, but was rewarded only with a long silence, punctuated by the sounds of Pilot's claws working more of Moya's controls. "How... how is Moya."

"Well enough," he responded in a detached manner, continuing to pay her very little heed as he continued his work.

"Pilot, we know each other too well for this: something's bothering you." He said nothing in reply, but the expression which flickered momentarily across his features betrayed that something was indeed bothering him and that she had been somewhat foolish to ask.

"Is it that I left Crichton... the other Crichton to go to Earth?"

Pilot uncharacteristically stopped working for a few microts, seeming to consider his response. He turned to look at her. It was a success, of sorts, even though his gaze made her feel uncomfortable, like a cadet caught performing some misdemeanour. He opened his mouth, paused for a microt and then began to speak.

"Although I cannot say that I approve of your actions, I cannot condemn you. Our own Aeryn would have done the same."

"Perhaps. That is what everyone keeps saying." She ventured a tentative half-smile and shrug.

"As I understand it, your Commander Crichton, the one that you abandoned, was amongst friends. On Moya. Just as ours was." He added quietly.

Aeryn widened her smile and reached out towards him, but drew her hand suddenly back at the harsh tone of Pilot's next words.

"Talyn, however, was not left amongst friends." His stare turned angry. "You abandoned Moya's child with Crais, Officer Sun. Do you have any idea what became of him?"

"No... I..." She had never really given it any thought. She had assumed that they had rendezvoused with Moya soon after her departure. But then what? Now Pilot’s anger made sense. Well, at least they had, hopefully, got to the heart of Pilot's hostility towards her. Hopefully.

"No, of course you do not. Neither do we. Of course, in our reality, he died, despite your best efforts. He died destroying Scorpius's wormhole research." Aeryn bit her bottom lip. It was a terrible thing to hear. The guilt, the feeling that it was all her fault, for choosing to leave for Earth with John, tore at her.

"Without you..." Pilot continued. "In your reality... Well, Moya and I wonder if he even managed that much."

"I am so sorry, Pilot," Aeryn struggled to find any words, far less the right words. Talyn had looked on her as... not a mother. What would John call it? An aunt, perhaps? With her upbringing, as just another cadet in a crèche devoid of emotional or family attachments, she lacked the framework to truly understand what she had been to Moya's son. "None of us... certainly not me... could predict how things would turn out. I thought it was the right thing to do at the time. Now? Nothing seems so clear."

"Indeed, Aeryn. There are so many possibilities." Pilot's voice seemed to have suddenly softened, as had his demeanour. Maybe she had found the right words? She was almost shocked to have managed to calm him so, with nothing but a few words. "Who can tell what happened? I... I believe Commander Crichton would have something incomprehensible yet somehow strangely comforting to say on the subject."

"Yes, I believe he would, Pilot." Aeryn reached out again, intending to stroke his cheek. He did not resist or pull away. "I've missed you..." she heard her voice say through the tears.


	9. Chapter 9

 

"Aeryn! Officer Sun!" Pilot's voice sounded over the comms. He seemed frantic, distressed even.

"Yes, Pilot?" Both Aeryns answered together, echoing each other as they looked up from the meal that they were sharing with Olivia, Chiana, Noranti and Young D'Argo in the central chamber.

"Moya and I have just detected a small vessel, moving fast towards us in an orbital trajectory..."

"How did you miss it?" MoyaAeryn demanded.

"How long till it gets here?" TalynAeryn asked simultaneously.

"Is it Scarran?" Added Chiana as the two Sebaceans finished speaking. The chamber fell into hushed silence as everyone waited for Pilot to reply.

"It has a Scarran signature, it came from behind the planet, and we have fewer than 100 microts till it reaches us!" Pilot supplied, the tone of his voice slightly elevated, betraying his obvious distress at the situation.

"Is the armoury still in the same place?" TalynAeryn called over her shoulder, having already reached the door leading out into the corridor.

"Chiana, take D'Argo to the safe room!" MoyaAeryn commanded, as she headed for the door on the heels of her less encumbered twin. "And yes!" she called after the other Aeryn as she followed her out into the corridor.

Chiana watched them go, then shook her head and pulled out her own small ivory-coloured pistol. It was an elegant affair, designed for civilised foes. Not lizards with armoured skins that were resistant even to some Peacekeeper assault weapons. She shook her head. "Dren!" She shouted angrily as she slammed her hand down on the table. "Frell that!" Olivia looked at her with a clear mixture of shock and confusion. D'Argo and Noranti meanwhile were both behaving as though nothing untoward was afoot, he calmly continuing to eat, she stacking away dishes. "NORANTI!" Chiana snapped. At least the narl had the excuse that he was too young to know what was going on.

"Yes, dear?" the old woman replied, pausing to smile at the young Nebari.

"Stop frelling about and take D'Argo and Olivia to the safe room!"

"Yes dear." Noranti replied absentmindedly as she stacked another plate.

"NOW!" Chiana insisted. Olivia was looking nervous by now, and had stood and moved across to D'Argo, taking his hand and helping him down from his table before pulling him into her arms. "I'm going to go help my girlfriends."

"But Aeryn said..." Olivia began.

"If it's Scarrans they're going to need all the help they can get!" Chiana checked her little pistol again. "Gonna need a bigger frelling gun..."

'~'

"It was like this with the Scarrans and Talyn at Dam Ba Da," TalynAeryn explained as the two ex-Peacekeepers, now both armed with shoulder-slung pulse cannons, headed towards the docking bay indicated by Pilot. "They sent a single-occupant craft a couple of arns ahead of the Dreadnought to scout the place out for them."

MoyaAeryn nodded. "When they tried to attack Earth in our reality they sent a Stryker ahead of a Dreadnought."

"Well, let's hope it's just one Scarran rather than a Stryker full," TalynAeryn responded as they rounded the last corner before the docking bay.

"Amen to that," MoyaAeryn replied, not even aware that after their cycles together she had adopted a John-ism.  TalynAeryn arched an eyebrow at that and stopped, gun level and ready, in front of the door. She nodded to her companion to indicate that she was ready and MoyaAeryn palmed the door control.

 '~'

"Commander Crichton!" Collins shouted, running into the workshop. Both Johns looked up, one from his position in the module's cockpit, the other from beneath the open cowling of the displacement engine.

"Wassup?" they asked together, one voice an echo of the other. They exchanged a wan look.

Collins slid to a halt between them, eyes darting from one to the other.

"We've just had word from your ship, the Leviathan. The Scarrans are back!"

"Frell!"

"How long have we got?"

"Umm, we think they're already here. Boarding your ship from something called a Stryker."

"By the time we get up there..." TalynJohn left the rest of the sentence hanging.

"Small ship... with luck, the girls can handle it," MoyaJohn added, although his expression betrayed how worried and concerned he really was by the news.

"We haven’t been able to detect any large vessels." Collins continued. "Yet."

"It'll be an advanced scout, probably curious to find a Leviathan orbiting Earth." TalynJohn continued. "The mother ship, the Dreadnought, will probably be here in an hour or two, if Dam Ba Da was anything to go by."

"Same thing when we closed the wormhole to Earth," MoyaJohn agreed.

"Well, is that thing ready?" Collins asked, inkling his head towards the module.

"Pretty much," TalynJohn replied. MoyaJohn nodded his agreement. "Just got to bolt the hood down."

"Good, then we'll need one of you to fly it."

"Both of us," MoyaJohn stated emphatically.

"No! No way!" Collins stared back at him. Then, getting nowhere with that approach, he turned and stared at the other John. "We need one of you down here. In case..."

"Both of us go up or no deal." TalynJohn insisted. His twin nodded. Collins pursed his lips, put his hands on his hips and stared at the ground.

"Too much of..."

"See if you can find some other sucker to fly the module and conjure you a wormhole weapon, then... I'm sure they're queuing round the block."

Collins looked up at the two Crichtons, who seemed united, for once, in their insistence that it was both of them or neither.

"Time's a-ticking..." MoyaJohn reminded him.

'~'

Chiana shuffled forward into the docking bay, moving slowly and carefully, one of Aeryn's pulse rifles clutched tightly in her hands. She hadn't seen a Scarran since the events at Quajaga, not since the day they had killed her lover, D'Argo. She heartily wished not to see one today, either, or ever again, for that matter, but it didn’t look like today was going to be her lucky day.

The docking bay was full of crates and smoke - fortunately it wasn’t the one where they kept their ships - Aeryn's Prowler and the two transport pods. By the illumination which spilled from a scattering of broken, randomly blinking ceiling and wall lights she could just about make out part of the shape of a Scarran Stryker parked at the far end of the huge chamber. However, the bay was eerily quiet. There didn’t seem to be any sign of either of the Aeryns, or of any Scarrans, for that matter.

Chiana shuffled forwards another couple of steps, wondering whether or not to call out to Aeryn, let her know that she was here - she didn’t want Aeryn to accidentally shoot her, after all. But then, if she called out, the Scarran would find out about her, too.

The unheralded whomp of a heavy pulse weapon discharging battered her ears and gripped her heart. It sounded again. It must be Aeryn, barely two rows of crates away by the sound of it. Caution forgotten, but rifle still held at the ready, she began running towards the sound.

Chiana skidded around a corner in time to see Aeryn - the other one, the one from Earth by the lack of baby bump, go crashing into a crate, propelled by a backhanded blow from a long-face Scarran. The heavy pulse rifle fell from the Peacekeeper's hands as she landed, leaving her with no weapon capable of penetrating her attacker's armoured hide. The lizard stood between Chiana and her shipmate, its back to the Nebari, and began limping towards Aeryn, hand outstretched to burn her with his heat ray. From the creature's gait, Chiana guessed that at least one of Aeryn's shots must have hit him, but the Sebacean was too stunned now to grab her gun and shoot him again.

Chiana ululated and unleashed a volley of shots from her own, lighter rifle. The Scarran staggered beneath the shots but did not fall. Instead he turned and began to close the short distance on Chiana. In a microt she could feel the nauseating, crippling waves of heat start to wash over her.  She slumped to her knees, the rifle tumbling from her grip. She looked up at her attacker, struggling to focus through the haze of heat. Was it the end for her?

His body jerked. Then jerked again. Then his head seemed to explode.

The heat faded in the space of a microt and Chiana slumped to the floor, breathing heavily.

"Chiana? Are you alright?" she looked up to see Aeryn, still on the ground close by, the heavy pulse rifle now back in her hands, aimed at the smoking corpse of the Scarran. Chiana realised she must have given Aeryn time to recover her more effective weapon by distracting the intruder for a couple of microts. Funny how things worked out, sometimes.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And you?"

"Fine. Just give me a microt." Chiana nodded. And just then Aeryn's heavy boots, her Aeryn's heavy boots, appeared at the corner of Chiana's vision.

"I think this is the only one. Pilot is scanning for more now, just in case," came Aeryn's reassuringly calm voice from just above her.

"Good," TalynAeryn responded, taking her twin's offered hand to help pull herself back onto her feet.

"Looks like you two did just fine without me," MoyaAeryn remarked, stepping back to cover the area with her gun and allow her twin to hold out a hand towards Chiana.

"Yeah." Chiana replied with the closest thing to a smile that she could manage, taking TalynAeryn's hand and using it to pull herself to her feet. "Looks like we did."


	10. Chapter 10

 

“Aeryn! Aeryn wait up a microt!” Chiana called as she dashed after TalynAeryn. The Sebacean was already in her full Prowler flight suit and heading for the docking bay. All things considered, with a Scarran Dreadnought closing on them fast, Chiana was in no doubt that Aeryn intended to fly out there and face them, no matter how hopelessly outgunned she might be.

“What is it, Chiana?” Aeryn tossed back over her shoulder, not slowing her purposeful stride by even a fraction. Frell, she had what John would call her game face on. The one that meant she was going to fight no matter the odds. Chiana redoubled her efforts to catch her up.

“You see, umm, the thing is…” Chiana began as she skipped along. She’d caught Aeryn up now, but still seemed to be forever half a pace behind. Should she really tell her about the baby? She felt ought to, as sort of penance, not that she believed in penance, but seeing as it was Chiana who had blabbed the secret to her own crew last cycle, after her own Aeryn had confided in her causing that Aeryn big problems with John. Also, she felt a little guilty now as to how mean she’d been to this Aeryn when she’d first come aboard. But how to tell her? They only had a few microts – the hangar bay door was in sight. Frell, why was it so difficult?

Aeryn palmed the door release to the hangar bay. She turned her head and fixed Chiana with a look which might have been impatient… might have been anything really. “What is it Chiana. I’m a bit busy… I’ve got to go and fight the Scarrans.” Chiana tried to hold up under Aeryn’s ‘big sister telling her little sister off for being inappropriate’ frown.

“You’re pregnant!” Chiana blurted out. Aeryn’s eyebrow seemed to arch a fraction of a dench and her head moved back the same amount. Was that disbelief, or shock she was showing? Well, at least she was showing something, other than impatience with her. “At least I think you are. Our Aeryn was, when she came back from Talyn, so you should be too…”

“That makes no sense,” Aeryn stated. However, Chiana’s words had managed to stop her headlong rush towards the Prowler, so at least she was listening, taking Chiana seriously.

“It’s in stasis.” Aeryn was frowning now, and looked about ready to turn and walk into the hangar bay. “Look, I don’t know how it works. And you don’t…  didn’t seem to either. Your people weren’t big on the whole sex ed-for-Prowler pilots thing. But you’ve got to be careful, OK? With the Scarrans.”

The sound of the outer hangar bay doors cycling caught both of their attention: It seemed to snap Aeryn into some sort of decision.

“Thanks,” Aeryn stated, her attention already on the main doors across the bay. “Look, it’s not top priority right now, Chiana, but we should talk later…OK?” And with that, she marched into the bay and towards her Prowler.

Frell! Chiana screamed inwardly. Was that it? Couldn’t Aeryn talk for just a microt longer? And what now? What would John say, if and when he found out? Had she really gone and blurted out the secret of the pregnancy and frelled it all up again?

‘~’

"So, which of us is going to fly the mission?" TalynJohn broached the question which had hung, unspoken, between them ever since they had climbed into Furlow's module and he had begun to pilot it towards Moya. MoyaJohn frowned. "Do the wormhole voodoo thing?" TalynJohn added, lest there was any misunderstanding.

"Rock, paper, scissors?" MoyaJohn suggested as TalynJohn lined the module up for the final approach to the docking web, through Moya's trident tail.

“I’m not D’Argo,” TalynJohn scoffed. Crichton had always been amazed that his Luxan friend seemed to have had no idea John was scamming him whenever they had played that game.

“No, you’re not,” MoyaJohn answered quitely, remembering that D’Argo had stuck with him throughout the last couple of years, through his desertion by TalynJohn and Aeryn and right up to his death at the battle on Quajaga. He was unable and unwilling to hide his melancholy.

“What? Where is the big…?”

“He’s been dead. Almost a year now.”

"Oh. Sorry to hear that,” TalynJohn fell silent for a few seconds, processing that news. “Look, it only takes one of us to fly the module. Your Aeryn needs you..."

"Thanks, man. But so does yours." The gossamer energies of the docking web snaked around the module and began to pull it inside the huge Leviathan.

"OK, well, then, put it another way. A kid's gotta have a father. And you've got one... two soon... right?" They entered the long, dark tunnel leading to the docking bay, following the landing lights down.

"So, you don't hold much store by the Spartan way of doing things? Sires only to hold the pass?"

"Do you?" TalynJohn replied, flicking the switch to activate the landing gear. MoyaJohn had to concede, his twin had a point there, and he knew it. They both knew exactly how the other thought, and for once, it meant they were both on the same page. If one of them had to fly the potentially dangerous, no potentially suicidal mission to summon the wormhole weapon, it should be the one who had no family.

A thoughtful silence fell for a few microts as they rolled along the final motras of the tunnel and through the open doors into the main bay.

"OK," MoyaJohn conceded as the doors began sliding shut behind them. He wondered if he should mention to his twin that the other Aeryn might be pregnant, too. That, if the timelines had been the same up to Dam Ba Da, then she was carrying his child in stasis, as yet likely unaware that she was even pregnant. Hell, if he did say anything, that would really put the cat amongst the pigeons...

As TalynJohn popped the module's canopy, MoyaJohn decided that now was not the time or place to open that particular can of worms. For better or for worse, he resolved to hold his tongue, at least for now, at least until the Scarran attack was over.

MoyaJohn climbed out of the module to find Aeryn - the not-obviously-pregnant one - in her Peacekeeper flight suit, doing final external checks of the Prowler. She turned to look at John. It looked like the girls had made a similar choice as to who was flying as wingman. Or woman.

He shook his head in response to her look of welcome. "Yours is still in the module. Running checks." She nodded and strode towards Furlow's copy of the Earth ship. As she reached MoyaJohn she paused, turned and stared at him.

"There's something different about that Prowler." It was almost an accusation. John shifted uncomfortably.

"I, umm, made some modifications."

"Modifications? To my Prowler?" Yep, that really did sound like an accusation, even without the dark flash of barely controlled anger which crossed her face, accompanying her words.

"Yeah, uh, to stop the pilot turning to goo in wormholes. I hope. Not really tested. Aeryn was cool with it. Where is Aeryn, anyway?" John's thoughts ran away with him. Had she been hurt dealing with the Scarran and they hadn’t told him? Had she gone into labour?

"She's on command. Watching the Dreadnought."

John nodded, feeling like a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. "OK. Thanks. I have to go." Aeryn nodded and continued towards the module, whilst John began to jog from the docking bay towards Command.

'~'

Aeryn was only a handful of paces from Furlow's module when John stuck his head above the edge of the cockpit and grinned at her. His smile stopped her in her tracks and before she knew it he had climbed out and was standing in front of her.

"Hey, gorgeous."

"Hey yourself." She smiled back - she couldn’t help herself. The sight of him looking at her over the edge of the cockpit of his pile-of-dren module stirred so many memories: Times spent working together in Moya's bay, maintaining their ships; of him climbing from the module, so happy to see her, after returning from some routine flight; their kiss across the edge of the cockpit after escaping the Royal Planet.

"So, how're things?" He shuffled nervously from foot to foot. She expected that he was hopeful that now they had escaped from Earth, got back to Moya, perhaps she would forgive him for leading her into the last couple of years of hell? She certainly felt inclined that way.

"You ruined my life..." The accusation was spoken softly and with a smile. He smiled back, encouraged, which was exactly what she had been hoping for.

"I know. Sorry." He reached up a hand to touch her cheek with his fingertips and she turned her face slightly into his hand, closing her eyes as she did so.

"Maybe you'll do better next time?" She opened her eyes to see him frown at that - she wasn’t surprised - she wasn’t entirely sure what she'd meant by that herself.

"So, here we are again. Module. Displacement Engine. Scarrans..." She remained silent as he rambled on, staring at him. "You. Me... A docking bay..."

"He said... they all said that in their reality you died at Dam Ba Da. Using the weapon."

"Yeah, I heard that. But it was getting the damn thing back from Furlow that killed him... me... my equivalent… Not using it. The casing came loose, or something. He got exposed to the partanium."

"I know..." she nodded, sniffed and wiped her nose with her fingers." But it still killed you. Look, I know I have been angry with you about how things have worked out for us here. I'm sorry."

"It's OK, babe. I understand. You've every right to be pissed at me..."

"They held you, too. Interrogated you. It wasn't you that did those things to you, to me. To us."

"I should've known... should've been more careful."

"Perhaps." She shrugged. "So should I. I was on your false Earth too, remember. I knew that it might have turned out like it did." They fell silent for precious microts, just holding each other close in each of their thoughts, in their intertwined eyes. "Seeing them... the other you and me. It's good to know we could have made it work..."

"Shh!" He whispered. "We'll get through this. Everything will be fine." She could tell that John was struggling to reassure them both.

"You ruined my life," she repeated, gently cupping his chin in her hand. He turned his head a fraction into her touch, raising his own hand to pull hers to his lips. "I wouldn’t have had it any other way."

"Officer Sun, Commander Crichton!" Pilot's voice came over the comms, dispelling the moment. "According to Moya's sensors, the Dreadnought will be in weapons range in 300 microts!"

Their hands dropped from her face, although their fingers stayed wrapped together. He quirked a half grin. "Guess that's my cue. Gotta go."

"Me too," she nodded in agreement, hefting the black-visored flight helmet she held in one hand for emphasis.

"You be careful out there." He squeezed her hand then released it. "I've just got you back. I don’t want to lose you again."

"Me, be careful?" She stifled a strangled laugh, almost a sob. "I'm going to be in my Prowler. You're going to be the one flying in that primitive bucket of dren."

"Don’t worry about me. Everything's gonna be just fine."

“It’d better be. Because when this is over we’ve got something important…” she began, thinking of Chiana’s revelation that she might be pregnant.

"Officer Sun, Commander Crichton," Pilot's voice interrupted again. "Should I open the inner docking bay doors?"

"Give us a couple of microts, Pilot," John called out in reply.

“The Dreadnought will be in weapons range inside…” Pilot continued, his voice high pitched and stressed.

"John, we really ought to get going. Goodb..."

"Shh. Don’t say it. We don’t say goodbye." He held up his hand and she echoed his gesture, allowing them to gently lace their fingers together for a couple of precious microts before they pulled apart. With one last effort, Aeryn pulled back her hand, which seemed to be bonded to his by their fingertips. Then he turned and began to walk away, towards the module.

"Fly safe, John," Aeryn called after him with all the authority and dignity she could muster. He waved a hand over his shoulder, which she took for a sign that he had heard and understood.  She turned and began striding across to the Prowler, pulling on the black helmet of her flight suit as she went, readying herself for the battle ahead.

'~'

"Commander Crichton!"

"Yeah, what is it, Lloyd? I'm kinda busy right now..."

"We're detecting a massive build-up of solar radiation on our sensors."

 "Not surprising, considering..."

"Commander!" Lloyd's voice insisted more urgently. "We estimate you have already been exposed to 35 rems! Another 30 seconds and it'll be ten times that! It's going exponential! You have to abort whatever it is you are doing!"

"A man's gotta do...." John replied, affecting a strange, deep, slow voice. The module did another lap of the blue, swirling mouth of the wormhole. With each circuit the spatial anomaly grew larger, more inescapable.

"What does it mean?" Aeryn asked John aboard Moya's command deck.

"He's too close to the wormhole - too close to the sun." John shook his head at the foolhardiness of his twin. "100 rem is verging on fatal. Pilot, best move us back a bit more."

"Indeed, Commander. Sensors are reading high variance in the rantac flux..."

"Not you too, Pilot!" the other John's somewhat peeved voice came over the speakers. "Look, we knew there was a risk. So could everyone shut up and let me do my job."

"No problem!" John replied, before flicking off the communications channel on Moya's control console."Moya's hull should protect us from the worst of it, but better safe than sorry...!" He continued, eyeing Aeryn's baby bump. "Pilot, can you move us away another metra?"

"We should help..." Aeryn began to protest. John slipped an arm round her shoulders, snagging her hand and pulling her into what he hoped would be a comforting squeeze.

"I know... but really, there's nothing we can do." He replied. "It's all down to him now." Trust the other him to be the big damn hero yet again John thought to himself bitterly.

'~'

Aeryn Sun accelerated her twin's Prowler down the tunnel leading from Moya's docking bay out into space and immediately began to flick the space fighter into one test manoeuvre after another, trying to refresh her memory and reflexes. She knew she had just a few microts to get used to flying again before the Scarrans arrived. It had been over five cycles since she had been one of the best combat pilots in the Peacekeepers, three cycles now since she had even flown a Prowler. A few microts would have to do.

Aeryn grimaced behind the black visor of her helmet, remembering how she had lost her last dogfight, which had been with John, or rather with the Scorpius neural clone then controlling him, and his pathetic unarmed module. Of course, that defeat had not been due to lack of skill on her part, rather it had happened because she had underestimated her enemy and allowed emotion to cloud her judgement. She spared only half an ear on the incomprehensible conversation between John and the humans down on Earth, her mind instead taking in the different views which rapidly passed her vision through the canopy. First came Moya, sleek and graceful when seen from behind through her trident tail, then the blue-green planet that John was even now planning to defend with his life, then the silvery disc of the planet's single moon and lastly John himself, or rather his module, flying in a tight circle around the mouth of a proto-wormhole. He might be fighting to defend his planet, but she was fighting to protect him. An urgent bleep from the Prowler's tactical display reminded her, not that she really needed reminding, that the fight was right at hand. The Scarrans were here: It was time. She spun the Prowler, turning it end over end, and engaged her main engines, passing close by Moya as she headed out of Earth orbit towards the incoming Strykers.

"John, the Dreadnought will be in range in about 100 microts, but there are three Strykers which will be with you in about 30." She advised him. "If they can get past me." She added with quiet determination.

"Don't worry, babe, you got 'em right where I want 'em..." John's voice replied, full of casual confidence. She wished she felt as confident. The odds were three to one, not even counting the Dreadnought. John's module and Moya were unarmed - everything would be down to her, her skill as a pilot and the capabilities of her ship. She just hoped the Prowler was in good condition. It would have to be. "Just keep 'em lined up like that. Everything'll be..."

She closed her mind to everything but the three blips, closing fast now, on her targeting computer, blocking out the radio traffic and the enormous threat-warning caused by the Dreadnought behind them. An alarm went off, signifying the Strykers were now within her weapons' range, followed a microt later by another alarm, warning that she was now in range of them. She automatically toggled the alarms off - they were nothing more than a distraction now.

Throwing the Prowler from side to side to try to avoid the incoming weapons’ fire now streaming past her, she fixed her attention on the central Stryker in the formation, weaving it this way and that in her targeting array, never giving them a static target, planning for the moment when she would get a lock on the Scarran ship...

There! She pressed the weapons fire stud on her control column, sending pulse cannon fire streaking towards the middle Stryker.

In the blink of an eye, she was through their formation. She rolled hard to come about to face them again, or rather, to get onto their tails. She noted with satisfaction the orange bloom which marked where the lead Stryker had been. One down. As far as she could tell, not a single one of their shots had hit her.

"Frell!" she exclaimed, realising that one of the two remaining craft was still heading single-mindedly towards the distant, barely visible blue swirl of the wormhole. She couldn’t make out the module at this distance, but she knew John would be there, conjuring the same weapon that he had used at Dam Ba Da. And she knew that the other Stryker would be in range to fire on his defenceless craft in a matter of microts. Finishing her turn, she pushed the engines of her Prowler to the maximum in pursuit of the Stryker heading for John, ignoring the proximity warning alarm, signifying that the Dreadnoughtwas now also coming into play.

"John, you have at least one Stryker incoming... I'm going to try to..."

"Just another twenty microts or so, babe. Great job, all the ducks in a row...!" came his apparently unconcerned reply. Frell him, didn’t he realise the danger he was in?

She could see the Stryker was lining up to fire on John now - she'd have just one chance to get the Scarran ship before it destroyed John! As she lined up to take the shot, Stryker weapons’ fire shot past her, from somewhere behind her, missing her by denches. Frell! The other one was on to her! But of course it was, had the situations been reversed, she and her wingman would have chosen much the same tactics. She'd got lucky once, they had missed her, but she knew it could all be over in the next microt. She just hoped she could destroy the Stryker which was attacking John first, give him the time he needed to activate the wormhole weapon.

Blocking out the threat to her own safety, she concentrated on the Stryker bearing down on John and the module, centring it in her sights. Her thumb began to push down on the trigger to the Prowler's pulse cannons.

Suddenly an enormous bulk swept past her canopy, motras away, on a trajectory which would surely intersect with the second Stryker, the one on her tail.

"Officer Sun," Pilot's voice filled her headset, clear and calm. "You are clear to fire." The weapons fire from the second Stryker had stopped. She knew instantly what must have happened: Moya had rammed the small craft attacking her, likely destroying it with her enormous mass. And now, she presumed, the Leviathan was shielding her from the Dreadnought, like a giant umbrella.

There was no time for words of thanks: She centred the remaining Stryker in her targeting display and fired. The Scarran ship blossomed satisfyingly into an orange fireball.

But then the fireball seemed to grow unexpectedly, bigger and bigger. She had seen the surveillance logs of the wormhole weapon which Talyn had recorded at Dam Ba Da, having been down on the planet during John's flight in the module that day. She knew instantly what it was. John had completed summoning the wormhole weapon.

"Aeryn, Moya, break off NOW!" John bellowed into the comms. Aeryn needed no further instructions, she was already rolling, half towards the mouth of the weapon, half away from the path of destruction it would unleash, trying to put the maximum tangent between her trajectory and the line of fire of the wormhole weapon. As the Prowler rolled, she caught a momentary glimpse of Moya's tails disappearing into starburst and then a wave of orange-white superheated solar plasma surged past her, tripping out systems all over the Prowler. 

"We got it! We got it!" she heard John shout just as the overwhelming heat from the wormhole weapon tipped her over into unconsciousness.


	11. Chapter 11

 

"Saturn..." John breathed in recognition as Moya emerged from starburst. "Pilot, how're we doing?"

"Moya sustained only superficial damage during the engagement," Pilot began. "We are scanning now for Scarran activity..."

John nodded and turned to Aeryn, who had been standing at the manual pilot's console during the engagement with the Scarrans, control column in hand, just in case she might be needed. "Hey, babe..." The words dried in his throat as he took in her slightly uncertain expression and the puddle of fluid gathering around her boots.

"John, I... I think my waters have broken," she remarked even as he rushed to her side.

"What is it with our kids wanting to be born during Scarran attacks?" he joked, wrapping steadying arms around her.

"They have your timing." She flashed him a weary smile. He smiled back at her apologetically as he peeled her hand away from its steely grip on the primary flight control with one hand and activated the comms with the other.

"Pip, can you rustle up my sister and Noranti and then meet me and Aeryn in our quarters?"

"Sure thing, old man. Olivia and D'Argo are still with me in the central chamber. I think Noranti is in the infirmary." John remembered now: of course they were - the central chamber was the safest part of the ship. That's where Chiana had taken D'Argo and his sister when the fighting had started. "What's up?"

"It's baby time!"

'~'

John Crichton held on fast to the controls of his module, focussing all of his attention on crafting the wormhole and positioning its other end within the corona of the sun. He'd done it once before, on Dam Ba Da. But this was different. This was Earth, his home, and Aeryn and Moya and almost everyone he'd ever cared about were here too. Those were probably among the reasons why the radiation was so much worse this time. He was forcing the issue, making sure that he got the other end of the wormhole in really tight on the sun. Part of him knew that he'd pushed it too far - heaven knows, Lloyd, the CAPCOM, had told him so forcefully enough, as had Pilot, and he was sure that he wasn’t imagining that he could already feel his body falling sick from the massive solar radiation exposure that had resulted from his foolhardiness.

But he could feel that it had worked... just another couple of microts... Here came the flare!

"Aeryn, Moya, break off NOW!" John bellowed into the comms. An infernal geyser of solar plasma, at least a dozen miles long and as hot as the surface of the star from which it had just been summoned, leapt outwards into space. In just a couple of seconds it engulfed the Scarran Dreadnought,overwhelming and consuming the mighty warship as though it were a mere trifle. It was a truly shocking sight to behold.

"We got it! We got it!" The Dreadnought was gone. Not even molten slag remained. It had been completely consumed by the unimaginable heat of Earth's own sun, funnelled through the wormhole and projected towards it at almost point-blank range. Just like the Dreadnought at Dam Ba Da had been.

John's joy was short lived, however. He could not forget that Aeryn was still in her Prowler nearby, perhaps Moya, too, to say nothing of the effect on his home planet if the mouth of the wormhole should change direction towards Earth's atmosphere. Swiftly, struggling against growing nausea and malaise, he began by redirecting the other end of the wormhole away from the sun - anywhere else was surely safer - as a prelude to shutting it down completely.

"Aeryn? Aeryn?" he asked, feeling faint now. There was no answer. He raised his eyes, struggling to do anything against the growing lethargy of the radiation poisoning he knew he had suffered. He really needed to close that damned wormhole, although perhaps it didn’t matter - it would close on its own in a short while.

"You OK, babe?" Silence. He decided to press on hoping she could hear him. He had a feeling his time was short and he had things he wanted to tell her. "I'm still here." He paused again, partly to draw breath, partly to give her a chance to let him know she was OK.

"Feel free to butt in any time..." he paused, his body wracked with a cough. After a couple of seconds it subsided and he carried on. "Looks like I've taken a big hit. Radiation. Nothing to be done." He paused, and a long silence filled the gap. "Hell, I hate long goodbyes anyway. I'm gonna miss you." Why did he say that, he wondered? He'd be dead - he wouldn’t be missing anything or anyone. There was still no reply from Aeryn so he continued, trying to fill the painful silence, to distract himself from thinking.

"I'm sorry things didn’t work out on Earth like we planned. I'm sorry about a lot of things. But I'm proud of what we've done here today." He took another long pause. Breathing was getting difficult. He wished he knew if she were safe, if she were alive, even.

"I love you," he whispered, before something outside of the module caught his eye. He strained to see out of the canopy. There was the Prowler... it seemed intact. It was drifting, though, engines powered down. With a sudden flash of horror he realised it was drifting towards the still-open entrance to the wormhole.

John struggled to find the energy to take the controls to the module or even the displacement engine. If he couldn’t shut down the wormhole, perhaps he could nudge the Prowler onto a different trajectory, to avoid the wormhole.  But he could not raise the energy - his hand reached the module's main controls, although he could not grip them, far less use them. His heart was torn with anguish as he realised he would fail. The Prowler drifted ever closer to the blue, swirling mouth of the wormhole. Let it shut! Please let it shut! His inner voice pleaded. But still it stayed open and still the Prowler drifted closer.

He tried one last time to manipulate the controls to the displacement engine even as the Prowler entered the mouth of the wormhole and was consumed.

"AERYN!" he called weakly before the sweet relief of darkness overcame him.

'~'

"Aeryn! You're doing fine," John called as he smoothed her forehead with his free hand, partly to support and encourage his wife, partly to distract himself from the mangling that she was giving his other hand. He knew well enough that it was to be expected that a woman in childbirth might have a grip like a vice, but Aeryn was a genetically enhanced former soldier in peak physical condition. He was starting to wonder whether he might actually have the odd broken bone or ten in his hand by the time their baby was born.

"Gah!" Aeryn responded eloquently through gritted teeth as another contraction wrung her body.

"You're doing fine," Olivia encouraged from the business end of proceedings in what sounded to John like a calm tone. He was glad someone here was calm. He knew that he certainly wasn't. Chiana and Noranti had to be lurking around somewhere, he knew, but he really couldn’t spare the attention right now to work out quite where and he was sure neither of them would be calm, either. Thank heavens they weren't making a fuss. He just hoped that, if Noranti was looking after their son, Pilot had at least assigned a DRD and part of his multi-tasking attention to making sure the crazy old woman didn’t get up to anything that she shouldn’t.

"How long did your first take to deliver?" Olivia asked.

"Oh, he was really quick," John replied without thinking.

"Quick?!" Aeryn responded between gasps of air. "You call that quick!?"

"By human standards. Just a couple of hours," John told his sister, trying to avoid further ire from Aeryn. "Three, maybe four, tops."

"Second babies are generally quicker and easier," Olivia responded reassuringly. At least that was how John took it. It must have been about an hour and a half since her waters broke so surely it must be soon?

"Easier? Fine. You frelling push it out, then!" Aeryn snarled. John gave his sister a slightly apologetic look. She smiled back. Olivia was probably used to this sort of thing. His attention was drawn back to Aeryn as her grip once again tightened, threatening to crush his poor abused hand.

"ARGH!!!" Aeryn snarled, her cry ear-splittingly loud this time.

"That's good, keep pushing!" Olivia encouraged. She paused and adjusted her position. "I think I can... I can see the head!"

"Great! Grab it and pull it out!" Aeryn demanded - John couldn’t tell whether she was being serious or not any more. "Argh!" She let out another cry, presumably as another contraction hit.

"OK, Aeryn, Aeryn, I need you to listen to me," Olivia said. "I want you to stop pushing now and take short breaths. Like this." She demonstrated with a few exaggerated pants. "Can you do that?"

Aeryn grimaced but nodded and began following Olivia's instructions.

"That's right. Good." Olivia encouraged. "Keep with that... I'll let you know if you need to do anything differently."

Aeryn just gritted her teeth and groaned again in response.

"You're doing great," John encouraged her, feeling the need to say something, no matter how trite.

"Grrr. Next time, you're doing it," Aeryn snarled at him.

"You mean there'll be a next time," John couldn’t help but grin, but he quickly concealed it when Aeryn glowered at him, arching an eyebrow.

"Not going to be a next time. Recreation is banned... gah!" Aeryn cried out then fell silent as she was gripped by another contraction.

"Don't push, don't push, just short, panting breaths!" Olivia interrupted, reminding Aeryn.

A long near silence followed - looking back later, John could not have said whether it lasted 30 seconds or ten minutes. The only sounds were Aeryn panting and groaning and his sister making encouraging noises.

"It's a girl!" Olivia announced suddenly, her face beaming, "John, do you want to cut the cord?" John nodded and moved towards his sister. A few seconds later Olivia wrapped the baby in a towel and handed her to John. He cradled her for a second, revelling in the moment, before bringing her up the couple of steps to hand to his wife.

"We have a daughter!" John echoed happily to Aeryn, handing the baby to her whilst she smiled weakly back at him with what appeared to be a mix of exhaustion and happiness.


	12. Chapter 12

 

Aeryn was jolted back into something resembling consciousness. Was it the Prowler hitting some sort of turbulence which had awakened her or had it been the voice shouting in her ear? Was that John's voice, her heat-befuddled and delirious brain wondered? Everything was so confusing, so muddled, she could scarcely remember anything, who she was, where she was, what she had been doing.

The Prowler shook again, but the voice, if it had been real, did not speak again. Was she even in a Prowler, or had she imagined that? She forced her eyes open. She was relieved that she was indeed in a Prowler, as she had expected, but something was causing it to shake violently, and maybe someone had been calling her on the comms. She needed to 'get it together.' It was not the time to sleep, no matter how badly she craved it.

"Frell!" she hissed, forcing reluctant and numb hands to grasp the controls. She seemed to be in a wormhole. She knew plenty about wormholes - John had used one to take them to the false Earth, and then had created another at Dam Ba Da, trying to get back to Earth while she had been co-piloting his module. She remembered how furious she had been with him that time. Then, of course, there had been... no, she could not quite remember. 

She felt a wave of nausea and clasped the controls tightly, squinting to see, trying not to vomit or faint. She'd be on punishment duty for a monen if she threw up in the Prowler's cockpit. That and she'd be the laughing stock of the pilots’ mess. Henta, and her other two wing-mates, would be so disappointed with her for letting their flight down. The male pilots, and not just those in her squadron, would mock her mercilessly for weekens.

She was sure John had created other wormholes in other memories too, but her mind was clouded by what she took to be heat delirium. Besides, it didn’t matter. She was in a wormhole. Wormholes were dangerous.

The wormhole twisted and she came close to flying into the swirling, blue wall. Don't touch the walls. Touching the walls was very bad she remembered from somewhere. Very, very bad.

Avoid the anti-energy distortions, the peaks in the rantac flux variance; they were the most dangerous of all. They turned Prowler pilots into goo, or so she had heard, but she couldn’t remember who had told her. Only the giant, symbiotic Leviathan Pilots could see those, it was said. She could see them, though, she thought with pride. Why was that again? She couldn't clearly recall, but there was another memory of John.

Frell, that was close: Another fork in the wormhole. She'd almost crashed the Prowler into the fork where the tunnel split in two. Concentrate, Sun. Wormholes could take you anywhere. What had John told her?

"Maintain focus. Destination is key." Black eyes. The blank, almost unreadable expression of a face that was only pretending to be Sebacean. Or was it human? Why couldn’t she remember?

Maintain frelling focus?! Whose stupid idea was it to say something as trite as that? She almost laughed, despite how sick she felt. All she wanted to do was go somewhere familiar, somewhere safe, somewhere she could lie down, curl into a ball and someone would help her feel better. Home.

She saw a potential exit from the system, coming up in a couple of microts. She knew she couldn’t keep this up for much longer. She had to get out of the wormhole before she lost consciousness. The exit felt right.

Home.

'~'

Moya emerged from starburst like a cat nosing its way through a curtain, a trailing gossamer net curtain of blue lightning slipping along her back and into nothingness as she passed from the void of hyperspace into the vacuum of normal space.

"No sign of the Dreadnought?" John half observed, half enquired as he nervously gripped the control console on Moya's command deck. They had been gone for over two arns: Although this time around the birth had been quick and trouble-free, compared to the last time anyway, he was still uneasy about leaving Aeryn and their new daughter in their quarters while Moya starburst back towards Earth and potential danger. But they had unfinished business they needed to attend to - they needed answers and they could not afford to wait for Aeryn to recover before they went looking for them.

"Indeed, Commander. Neither is there any sign of the Prowler."

"Are we in the right time and place?"

"The module is still there. In a decaying orbit around your planet. Other planetary scans match those of when we left." John nodded, relieved that everything was as they expected it to be and that the Dreadnought seemed to be gone. Unless it was hiding on the other side of the planet, of course, or behind the moon?

"Looks like he did it."

"Commander Crichton, we are being hailed by Mr Lloyd."

"Put him on."

"Commander Crichton?" The familiar voice of Lloyd, the CAPCOM hailed from somewhere down on Earth.

"Yep."

"Umm, which one?"

"The new one, the one on Moya," John replied with a sigh and a roll of his eyes. This was frelling confusing. They'd have to work something out if they were going to spend any time in the same vicinity. The twin would have to change his name to something else. Homer, perhaps? "We just got back from a… umm… strategic starburst."

"Are you all OK up there? You won't believe some of the telemetry we got, even from the ground..."

"Is the Scarran ship... is it gone?" John demanded. He needed to know. Everyone on Moya needed to know. It was their asses on the line up in space if it wasn’t.

"It would seem so. There seemed to be a massive burst of radiation and a solar flare, almost within spitting distance of Earth."

"The wormhole weapon?"

"That would be our best guess. Can you confirm?"

"Pfft. I'm guessing so. And the Prowler?"

"The what?"

"Frell!" John cursed under his breath. Of course, in this reality he and Aeryn had never been to Earth. No, that wasn’t quite right: He and Aeryn hadn’t come to Earth last year on Moya and had IASA and the US Air Force's brightest and best prodding and poking at her Prowler. In this reality, no one on Earth had ever seen a Prowler.

"The Peacekeeper space fighter that *your* Aeryn was flying to buy *your* Crichton enough time to destroy the Scarran ship." John explained through gritted teeth. "Have you heard from her, even?"

"Umm. We're not sure. Most of our systems are still out from the last attack. Then your weapon thing blinded a lot of what we still have for a bit. But we think there were two small objects close to the wormhole just after the attack, both the size of the module or thereabouts. One must have gone through after about a quarter hour."

"And I guess the other is the module. Yeah. We can still see it."

"Umm, right, about that. You've been ordered to retrieve it and bring it back down immediately - the Joint Chiefs want our boys to take a good long look at it...."

"Hmm, of course they do. Look I'll get back to you on that."  Having seen how his twin and Aeryn had been treated down there the last couple of years, John was in no hurry to put himself at their mercy. They could go whistle if they thought he’d be going back down there any time soon.

"What? No! That's an order from the highest..."

"Look, I'm gonna be busy for a bit recovering the module. Crichton out." John grimaced as he broke the radio connection to Earth. Let them stew – all of the balls were in his court now, and it was up to him - and Aeryn and Pilot - to decide how they wanted to play them.

"Commander Crichton, I am deploying the docking web to bring the module aboard," Pilot broke in.

Crichton nodded. "Thanks Pilot." He toggled the comms. "Noranti, can you meet me in the docking bay, please?" He needed help with whatever it might contain. Aeryn was out of the question, even if she hadn't just given birth: She'd already buried her incarnation of his twin, a couple of cycles earlier at Dam Ba Da, and the experience had left her emotionally broken. He couldn’t drag his sister into this and as for Chi, well, she'd certainly suffered enough trauma of her own with the whole dead twin thing. Poor Chiana had witnessed Kaarvok sucking out and consuming her twin's brain, could probably still hear her twin's anguished screams in her worst nightmares. So that left the crazy old woman, who was probably the best choice regardless, for all sorts of reasons.

"Of course, Commander," came Noranti’s smooth reply. Was it just him, or was there something really creepy about the way she seemed to know what she was meeting him to do and the way she seemed totally happy with the whole sorry business?

"OK, then. Let's go find out if I'm dead," Crichton muttered to himself as he strode from the command deck.

Better get it over with before Aeryn or Chi started to stick their noses in or ask awkward questions.

'~'

John paced back and forth, anxious to get Furlow's module aboard and get on and find out what horrors it contained. The sooner it was over and done with the sooner his mind could focus on less unpleasant things. That, and Noranti's saintly smile was starting to make his flesh creep.

"Knock it off, will you?" He snapped at her before turning his head away so that he didn’t have to look at her anymore. The hangar doors rumbled as they started to open.

"Knock what off?" Noranti enquired of his back.

John ignored her, squeezing through the still expanding gap between the hangar bay doors before he rushed towards the module. He slid to a halt beside its darkened canopy and caught his breath, gathered his thoughts, steeled his resolve. There was no sign or sound from within. He hit the emergency canopy release. The Plexiglas flew up towards the ceiling, propelled by the escaping gasesof a dozen or so small explosive charges, causing John to momentarily dodge aside to avoid it. Then it crashed to the floor and John stepped back up to the low-slung capsule.

John Crichton lay motionless within, slumped forward against the harness holding him in the pilot's seat. His head was pitched further forward still. A trail of vomit stretched down the front of his flight suit. A mix of bodily fluids were pooling on the floor. John leant in and stretched his arm out, pausing just before it reached his twin. He took another breath then took hold of his twin's shoulder, pushing him back against the seat.

John Crichton's still, open, dead eyes stared back at him. Horrified, John slid back down the side of the module in shock, barely keeping upright as his feet hit the floor. Part of him had known it was a possibility, but he was still unprepared for the full horror of seeing himself, dead.

With surprising agility for one who professed, and indeed appeared, to be so old, Noranti quickly clambered up the side of the module, peered inside for a microt, leant forwards to do something which John could not make out, and then returned to the deck beside him. She positioned herself to address him.

"The other John Crichton is dead. The divine balance is restored." She waved her hands in the air around her head like some Earthly mystic and smiled at him. It was beyond infuriating.

"I can't believe you just said that, old woman!" John exploded. For all that he hadn’t liked his twin, he remembered only too well how the other John Crichton's death had affected his Aeryn three cycles ago, how it had torn her apart. "What about Aeryn!?"

"Well..." Noranti waggled her head noncommittally. "She and your offspring are well," Noranti continued, allowing a trace of confusion to tone down her smile by a notch or two. "In your quarters."

"The other Aeryn!" John shouted in frustration. The crazy old woman could be so... infuriating at times.

"Ah." Noranti nodded, as though some great truth had been revealed to her. "Have faith. She is surely when and where she was always meant to be."

"What the hell!!!?"

"The Divine Eternal provides. The balance is restored." Noranti waved her arms around in the sort of child's prayer-like gesture that often accompanied her mystical pronouncements and gave him a beatific smile. 

John ground his teeth and reminded himself that it was impolite and inadvisable to slap an old lady. He could barely believe his ears, how she could be so blasé, so callous about the whole business. She was definitely cut from a different cloth, of that there was no doubt. He shook his head and blew out a breath.

"Come on, old woman," He forced himself to speak, to act. He took hold of her elbow. He had chosen to bring her down to the hangar for a reason, after all. "We need to deal with the body, preferably before Aeryn, Chi or my sister can get down here."


	13. Chapter 13

 

"How do you think Olivia is coping?" Aeryn asked. She was nursing her new daughter whilst seated in the rocking chair which John had built for her after D'Argo had been born.

“Hmm, what… oh, well enough, I guess.” John shrugged as he sat on their bed, keeping D'Argo entertained and away from his mother. It had been a couple of arns now since he and Noranti had wrapped up his twin's body and placed it in storage, to be dealt with further at a less hectic time. It was a couple of arns more since the confrontation with the Scarrans. An awful lot had changed in those arns, for everyone, but at least the threat of the Scarrans was averted, he was back home on Moya and his Aeryn had safely given birth to a healthy daughter. They still had no clue as to the fate of the other Aeryn, though.

“She will expect us to stay, to go down.”

"Yeah, probably."

"And?"

"I don’t trust the spooks down there. Politicians and half the scientists and top brass either." John mumbled whilst butting knuckles with his son. It was hard to keep a clear head, all things considered, but he knew how he felt about things like the threat that Earth posed to him and his family, regardless.

"They will be looking for leverage to use against you." How could she be so rational, so calm, he wondered, after everything that had happened today? Must be that famous Peacekeeper training and discipline coming through once again. She was right, of course. Even if he could trust Collins and Hobbes, which he wasn’t sure about, there would be others. Others with an agenda. Others he couldn’t trust.

"Yep," he nodded and gave a wry grimace. "Things are unstable, too. No knowing how things could pan out. You and the kids just couldn't go down there."

She didn’t reply to that comment, lowering her eyes instead to their new daughter. When it was clear that she wasn’t going to say anything, John cleared his throat.

"Umm, I'm going to head up to the centre chamber in a bit. See how everyone's keeping. Can I get you anything?"

"She's asleep." Aeryn nodded at their daughter then looked up at him. She leveraged her way to her feet before starting to pick her way stealthily towards the crib. "I'll come with you."

"Are you sure? Shouldn't you..?" John fell silent beneath her furious-looking glare. She'd never taken well to being told what to do, or to being told to take it easy. Looking away from him, she bent, laid the child in the crib and then straightened her back, working out a kink or two whilst a DRD rolled to a halt beside her, ready to assume baby-monitoring duties. She eyed it with a satisfied nod and turned and walked towards the door.

"Well, are you coming?" She asked, having paused in the doorway, fingers strumming on the door frame, turning her head to look over her shoulder towards him.

'~'

"But we do have two of the module now." John told the assembled crew, gathered in the central chamber. Even Pilot was there, albeit virtually, via the clamshell.

"That pile of dren?" Aeryn side-eyed him, rolling her beaker of juice around between her hands.

"Hey, play nice!" He replied, hands outstretched in front of him, gesturing like some sort of air-pianist.

"I'm not good at nice." But she smiled at him as she said it, acknowledging their private joke.

Olivia seemed a little shocked by the exchange, but John chuckled and reached out to rub his wife's hand. Aeryn smiled back at him.

"You could give one of them to Earth. Why don't you just give them back Furlow's module and that frelling weapon?" Chiana asked, slugging back a razlak, her third of the meeting. She had already made it clear that, whilst she didn’t wish any harm to Earth, she also didn’t want to countenance anything which might put her or any of her friends at risk on Earth's behalf. "Then we can leave."

"No. No way do I trust them with the wormhole weapon," John replied. He'd been over this so often in his mind over the years. Not the events of the last few hours, nor even a little alcohol, were sufficient to cloud his thoughts on that. He was very clear in his own mind where he stood on such things. "Frell, keeping the damn thing out of people's hands is what we fought so hard for, what Talyn and Crais died for."

"You can't leave us defenceless - what if another Scarran ship comes?" Olivia protested, appealing to her brother over the heads of his extraterrestrial companions. "Anyway, you took it down there before, what's different now?"

"Fixing it and using it to protect Earth is different to handing it over." John shrugged. He wasn’t going to let anyone, not even his sister, talk him into dishing out wormhole weapons to all and sundry. "Besides, the frelling thing's bust again. Won't work, and they can't fix it."

"So, the humans have nothing to protect themselves with." Aeryn was ever the strategist. Gotta love a jirl with a fine military mind. "And neither do we." Ah. Problemo. He looked her in the eye. She looked back. He grimaced, feeling slightly sick. If the Scarrans sent another ship now they were indeed truly frelled. Right up the eema, as Chiana might say.

"We're just gonna have to sit tight for a bit, repair Furlow's module and the displacement engine and mind the shop till we can think of a better plan." John shrugged a shoulder, trying to keep both wife and sister happy. "Whether the powers that be down below like it or not." Hopefully that was that, for now. Hopefully it'd buy him some time so that he could think of something else, better, later.

A contemplative silence fell over the chamber. John was almost on the point of breathing a sigh of relief at the success of his plan when Aeryn spoke again.

"It won't have escaped your notice that the other John is dead from radiation." Aeryn challenged him, clearly far from placated, far from finished with their conversation. She glared in turn at John and Olivia, who both squirmed uncomfortably either under her gaze or from her implication that further use of the weapon was suicide. "Using the weapon killed him."

"Yeah, but, umm, he... the other me... he pulled the same trick at Dam Ba Da and survived." John tried to argue, tried to wheedle his way out of Aeryn’s challenge, if only to fight another day.

"In his reality. Not in ours." Aeryn was choking back a tear now. “Our version of him died at Dam Ba Da.” He was in trouble if they kept down this path much longer: His Aeryn, this Aeryn, had already lost him once to the wormhole weapon - she'd held John Crichton in her arms as he had succumbed to radiation poisoning back on Dam Ba Da. "We don't know whether using that thing was survivable in our reality. It killed our other John before he even got to use it." She continued, driving home her point, in case he had somehow forgotten.

John grimaced at that, whilst Olivia looked horrified. She turned pale and looked about ready to throw up. Chiana and Aeryn didn’t look much better either. Only Noranti seemed blissfully unconcerned by all the talk of people dying... scratch that, of him dying, over and over. Did he really mean that little to the old woman, or was she just totally off her rocker?

"Ok. So if it comes to that, I'll just have to be careful. I've got motivation he didn’t," John tried again, signalling D'Argo, playing in the corner, with his finger.

"Even if I accept that argument, which I don't," Aeryn responded, her eyes flashing with anger, "we've lost the Prowler, John. If the same thing happens again, I won't have an armed ship to watch your back with."

"Yeah I know." John nodded. "Can't say I'm over the moon about that."

"The Divine Eternal will provide," Noranti chimed in, beaming beatifically but not providing any evidence to support her assertion. Her strange pronouncement did at least serve one purpose, though: It managed to diffuse some of the tension in the room by providing a common antagonist for everyone else to redirect their animosity towards.

"What the frell..!?" someone shouted indignantly. John thought it was Chiana, but it didn’t really matter. It could have been just about any of them.

'~'

"What are we going to do, John?" Answers, easy answers, had not been forthcoming in their crew conference and it had eventually broken up. Young D'Argo had needed to be put to bed, after which Chi had discreetly taken Olivia in hand, suggesting that they could 'babysit' him. It was really just an excuse to give John and Aeryn a little privacy: the DRDs had babysitting duties covered, after all, with Pilot able to summon his parents in an instant should they be needed.

John and Aeryn had soon found themselves on the terrace, wrapped in furs and each other's warm, loose embrace whilst Aeryn nursed their new baby daughter, who had woken up once again, wanting to be fed.

"I don’t know babe. I mean there are other realities... uncountable. Some better ones, some worse ones."

"But this is the one we're in right now." He nodded. She knew that it would be hard, if not impossible for him to simply walk away from this version of Earth, to tell himself that there were versions that were not under threat from the Scarrans and others yet that were in even more dire need of help. She would have to see what she could do to make him see reason. “Although it isn’t the one we come from.”

"Whatever we do decide on, it's gonna have to be one hell of a good plan." John remarked, pulling her closer to his side. She tried to ignore the niggling thought that his plans always went disastrously wrong, taking comfort in the moment, in his embrace. She snuggled into his solid, reassuring warmth, feeling his heartbeat beneath her hand. She felt an icy chill grip her at the sudden thought of how easily that heartbeat could be silenced.

"I don't think we should stay or get involved."

"Hmm?" He stroked her hair from her brow. "Why so?" She knew that he hadn’t yet accepted that they had to leave. Perhaps a solution that they could both feel comfortable with would turn up? Or, realistically, perhaps she'd just have to make him understand why they couldn’t stay, instead.

"Our plans never work. Whenever we get involved, things go wrong, people die. More so with these alternate timeline things. Remember the peace memorial? The Jocacean nurses?" His hand stilled. Of course he would remember how their interference had inadvertently led to a steady worsening of events, culminating in the deaths of the nurses and their young charges. She decided to let him remember that disaster for a few microts, to dwell on the inadvisability of them meddling in realities that were not their own.

“But what about Liv?” Well, at least he had a good point there. If they left, would she stay, or would she want to go with them? Or perhaps do something else? She hadn’t been happy with the idea of them leaving, earlier in the central chamber.

“We’ll just have to ask her,” Aeryn considered Olivia’s likely reaction. Surely she’d want them to stay, to protect Earth with the wormhole weapon as best they could? Aeryn would have to make it clear to her that that was not an option.

“Hmm,” John grunted, as though considering the radical option of talking to his sister.

"And I'm not happy about you using that thing again, either," she stated, deciding he had had enough time to dwell on either talking to his sister or the horrific events at the peace memorial. She hoped she was clear about her emphatic rejection of any plans to stay here and use the wormhole weapon again, but, just in case, she had decided to repeat herself until it was clear that John fully understood how she felt.

"Hmm?"

"The displacement engine. Three times you've used it and twice you have died. Those odds are not good, John." He stirred beneath her. Perhaps he was just trying to get more comfortable?

"Fourth time's the charm?"

"Not funny, Crichton," She snapped back.

"Then what do we do?" He lifted his hand and began to gently, slowly stroke the hair on the side of her head.

"Hope that the Scarrans have been scared off?" Frankly, she didn’t much care. If the choice came down to her small, hard-won family or a planet she hardly knew in one of an untold number of alternate realities, it was no contest as far as she was concerned.

"Hope and stay or hope and go?" She considered his question for a microt. Neither option was ideal: One involved an open-ended commitment to stay here, where she and her children would never be safe or welcome; the other left this version of his home world defenceless against further Scarran attack. Besides, if they stayed, what would they do if the Scarrans returned? As far as she could see, staying was just an invitation to John to do something stupid. But how easily would he accept going? How would that make him feel? Would he blame her for leaving, for anything, real or imagined, which might then happen to this Earth? She sighed. Regardless of her fear that he might blame her if they left she could only see one practical way forwards.

"John, I'm not sure what more we can do here. We can't go down to Earth, not in this reality. It would be too dangerous for us."

"We can't just abandon them," he pleaded. She could feel him trying to catch her eye, to harness her will to his. She refused to cooperate, keeping her eyes and her attention on their daughter.

"John, we cannot protect Earth in every reality." She insisted. "You know that."

"I don't see..."

"This is just one reality, not even our own." She elaborated. "We have to accept that there are timelines where we can do nothing to protect Earth. And then there is our reality, where perhaps we can make a difference, to all sorts of things. Perhaps we have done all we can here?"

She could feel John shaking his head, seeming to still be in denial. His hand had stopped stroking her hair now, but still rested on her head.

"We have stopped the Scarrans here, John." She continued. If he was not going to speak then it was up to her to do so. "Sent a message. But this isn't our reality. Would you leave the timeline where we belong unprotected? Would you risk that? Would you leave Rygel without our support? And then there are our children. And Chiana, Pilot, Noranti even. We cannot stay here. We don't belong." She could almost hear him thinking in the short silence which followed her speech.

"Yeah, no, I know. You’re right. You’re always right,” he seemed to whisper, perhaps with a hint of resentment, under his breath, although he must surely have known she would hear. She let it pass: As he seemed to have conceded her point, she could afford to be magnanimous. “I just need a little time. It isn’t easy..."

"When is it ever?" Aeryn asked, burrowing deeper into her husband's side. Together, and in silent contemplation, they sat watching the beautiful blue-green orb, slowly spinning below.

She allowed herself a small smile, satisfied that she seemed to have won this latest battle. They would make their farewells and leave, if not tomorrow then perhaps the day after, or the day after that. It was simply a matter of time.

It was, after all, always simply a matter of Time.


	14. Epilogue One

 

Wreckage. That was all that was left of the once mighty Peacekeeper Command Carrier 'Kalvanion' after Crais and Crichton's treachery had destroyed it. Wreckage and the desiccated remains of the uncounted Peacekeepers who had lived, served and died aboard the craft. And now, despite his best plans and preparations, it looked like the wreckage of the Kalvanion was going to be the last resting place of its final captain as well.

Scorpius had escaped from the destruction of the carrier, monens earlier, only to be captured and tortured in the Aurora chair as a traitor by that self-serving fool, Commandant Grayza. When he had met Crichton again both of them had been her prisoners on the planet of Arnessk. There Grayza had ordered Scorpius executed, which, amusingly, had allowed him the opportunity to escape. Interestingly there had been no sign of the previously ever-present former Peacekeeper Officer Sun at Crichton’s side on Arnessk, but he had not been able, at the time, to determine why. Crichton and his band had affected a spectacular escape from the Commandant by crashing an ancient Leviathan onto her operations base and the flotilla of ships parked there. Scorpius had then taken the opportunity afforded by Crichton's swathe of devastation to depart from Arnessk aboard an abandoned, badly damaged Marauder. He had returned to the site of the Kalvanion's destruction, attempting to seek answers to various riddles, and perhaps a more spaceworthy ship, amongst the debris.

The wormhole was still there, close enough to the Command Carrier's wreckage to see with the naked eye, its blue maw intermittently appearing and disappearing. However there was nothing of any significance to be salvaged from the cloud of Command Carrier debris. And, of course, his Marauder's main drive had finally ceased to function. That was not the end of his bad luck, though: He doubted if the life support systems on the damaged Marauder would last much longer either.

And then the wormhole spat forth something most unexpected. A Prowler, one of the Kalvanion's own, from the markings and ident beacon, scorched by weapons fire but looking essentially intact, tumbling end over end as if the pilot were dead. Most likely they were: Prowler pilots did not survive wormholes - not even Crichton seemed to know why.

Scorpius's mind went into overdrive: If the Prowler were spaceworthy, all he needed to do would be to net it, clear out the remains of the late, unfortunate pilot and his most immediate threat of death would be solved. Then he could use the small craft to search for some way, some place, to find refuge from Grayza.

Scorpius fired up the Marauder's manoeuvring thrusters and edged towards the Prowler, finally bringing it into his larger vessel's tiny, one-Prowler docking cowl - big enough to open the small fighter craft's canopy, but not big enough to contain the whole ship.

He popped the Prowler's hatch. And, for the first time in many cycles, Scorpius expressed his surprise with a profanity, like a common soldier.

The pilot of the Prowler was none other than Officer Aeryn Sun. She looked slightly different to how he remembered - her hair was much longer, for one thing. And she was clearly very sick - feverish, unconscious. But, extraordinarily, and as far as he knew uniquely amongst Prowler pilots who had flown through a wormhole, she was alive. So, that was why she had not been on Arnessk.

Scorpius allowed himself a slight frown of confusion, after all there was nobody to see his show of weakness. And then he began to ponder the situation. He was fairly certain Officer Sun had formed some sort of emotional attachment to Crichton and vice versa. As such, she could prove very useful. If he could save her life then he could take her to Crichton and somehow use her as leverage both for his own safety and, ultimately, to access the human's knowledge of wormholes.

But first he needed to stabilize Officer Sun: she was hot and feverish. He was only too aware that heat delirium could be fatal to a pure-bred Sebacean such as her. He had a spare of his own coolant suit in the Marauder - one of the only things of value he had managed to salvage from the remains of the Kalvanion. With a little modification the spare suit should do the job nicely.

He began unbuckling the harness which held her to the pilot's seat and grunted as he began to heave her out of the tight space and into the larger Marauder. A broad smile slowly spread across Scorpius's features as a plan began to take shape in his labyrinthine mind. 


	15. Epilogue Two

 

"Officer Sun! Crichton!" Bialar Crais called out, pulling himself up the flashing red console, back to his feet.

"Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on!" Crichton called out, crawling across Talyn's bridge towards Crais. Crais looked around, sparing Crichton a brief, uncertain smile. The expression gave Crichton pause to wonder at how he had come to this point: How Crais, the man who had marked him for death on his first day in the Uncharted Territories had become his ally and friend. The real watershed, for Crichton, had come two years ago when Crais had returned from evading the Peacekeeper retrieval squad, telling how Aeryn Sun and Crichton's twin had left for Earth after the twin had destroyed a Scarran Dreadnought. Somehow, those events had drawn the two men together. Perhaps it had been that they had both felt a degree of loss once Aeryn had gone? Perhaps it was their shared agenda of evading the Peacekeepers and safeguarding the secret of wormhole weapons? Whatever, it had not been long before John had found himself joining Crais on Talyn, whilst the rest of the crew went with Moya seeking more peaceful, private outcomes.

"I am fine," Officer Sun echoed from further back on the bridge. The bigger surprise, for both men, had come six months after the departure of Aeryn and John's twin for Earth, when Officer Sun had come up to them one day on a grubby commerce planet and asked to join them.

"Uh, what happened?"

"Where are we?"

"I am not sure." Crais replied. "That last Scarran volley, before we entered the wormhole... It seems to have caused some damage to Talyn's sensors."

"Well, at least no one is shooting at us now."

"That's almost a first!"

A planet came into view through the narrow windows at the front of Talyn's command centre as the gunship rotated slowly on its axis.

"I will go out in my Prowler. Tell me what readings you need." Officer Sun began striding towards the door.

John caught her arm. "No need. I know where we are," John Crichton said softly, almost unable to tear his eyes away from the window.

"Well, where the frell are we, then?" She snapped. John looked round. Despite her scarred cheek the irritated expression on her face reminded him of the woman he had once loved. Even after over two years together he still got a shock sometimes when he looked at her. She looked so much like her daughter, so much like the woman who had abandoned him, apparently to run off to Earth with his twin three years ago.

"Well, where are we then?"

"It's Earth, Xhalax," John replied, half ignoring the captain and taking a step towards the window. "My home."

 

_**The End** _


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